Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Day 142 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
Levee Moan" is the first song in the BLUES, MELLOWS, BALLETS chapter of Carl Sandburg's AMERICAN SONGBAG. And it comes at 142 days into the corona pandemic, and I'm feeling down, so this is a very appropriate chapter.
Sandburg writes: "Both Mississippi and Ohio river levees have had versions of this one, which reached up into the region roundabout Pendleton, Indiana, where it was heard by Lloyd Lewis, the Free Quaker pegged elsewhere in this book. A sonorous lament, is " Levee Moan.*' fully equal to many Gregorian chants that could be named. Some of its lines assuage the bitterness of our short mortal pilgrimage, some have an overtone aiming at the world beyond the flesh, while others are rooted amid such plain realities as the iron pathway of "dat ol' K. C. line.""
Day 142 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
Levee Moan" is the first song in the BLUES, MELLOWS, BALLETS chapter of Carl Sandburg's AMERICAN SONGBAG. And it comes at 142 days into the corona pandemic, and I'm feeling down, so this is a very appropriate chapter.
Sandburg writes: "Both Mississippi and Ohio river levees have had versions of this one, which reached up into the region roundabout Pendleton, Indiana, where it was heard by Lloyd Lewis, the Free Quaker pegged elsewhere in this book. A sonorous lament, is " Levee Moan.*' fully equal to many Gregorian chants that could be named. Some of its lines assuage the bitterness of our short mortal pilgrimage, some have an overtone aiming at the world beyond the flesh, while others are rooted amid such plain realities as the iron pathway of "dat ol' K. C. line.""
