Uploaded October 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Day 200 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
Sandburg writes: "This arrangement is based on the song given by Mary Leaphart, whose husband is the head of the department of law at the University of Montana. Mrs. Leaphart is Kentucky born and spent years among the mountain people who sing this; her performance of it is an impersonation; she identifies herself with a character.
It is to be sung staccato, nasal, abrupt, with contempt, yet with nice control as though railroads come and railroads go but the mountains and us, the mountaineers, live on. We can almost see the mountaineers sitting in their cabin doorways watching the railroad gangs come up the valley; they scorn the boasted oncoming civilization."
The similarity in lyrics between the Brown and Sandburg versions clearly make them the same, though Brown's is a clear reminiscence of the bitter era in the American South after the Civil War, when Jim Crow laws made life miserable for Blacks. The Brown lyrics are much more explicit:
Don't like a rich white man nohow (x2),
Head like a hoss, and he tries to be de boss,
An' I don't like a rich white man nohow.
Don't like a poor white man nohow (x2),
Head like a mule, an' he tries to act a fool....
An' I don't like a poor white man nohow.
The resulting texts, though almost entirely the same in form, have completely different feelings. I have to suspect Sandburg's text is a cleaned up version -- but it too is seemingly early.
Day 200 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
Sandburg writes: "This arrangement is based on the song given by Mary Leaphart, whose husband is the head of the department of law at the University of Montana. Mrs. Leaphart is Kentucky born and spent years among the mountain people who sing this; her performance of it is an impersonation; she identifies herself with a character.
It is to be sung staccato, nasal, abrupt, with contempt, yet with nice control as though railroads come and railroads go but the mountains and us, the mountaineers, live on. We can almost see the mountaineers sitting in their cabin doorways watching the railroad gangs come up the valley; they scorn the boasted oncoming civilization."
The similarity in lyrics between the Brown and Sandburg versions clearly make them the same, though Brown's is a clear reminiscence of the bitter era in the American South after the Civil War, when Jim Crow laws made life miserable for Blacks. The Brown lyrics are much more explicit:
Don't like a rich white man nohow (x2),
Head like a hoss, and he tries to be de boss,
An' I don't like a rich white man nohow.
Don't like a poor white man nohow (x2),
Head like a mule, an' he tries to act a fool....
An' I don't like a poor white man nohow.
The resulting texts, though almost entirely the same in form, have completely different feelings. I have to suspect Sandburg's text is a cleaned up version -- but it too is seemingly early.
