Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Day 172 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
A great song, honed over 120 years and still applicable.
Sandburg writes: "Fragments of this were heard in Illinois in the early 1890’s. S. K Barlow, a Galesburg milk-man who used to be a fiddler at country dances near Galva, sang it for me as we washed eight-and two-gallon delivery cans and quart-measure cups on winter afternoons. W. W. Delaney said, "As near as I remember that song came out in the 1860's, just after the war.""
ADDITIONAL NOTE: (from THE FARMER IS THE MAN (Bob Waltz), Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, August 2006.
I recently read a book on history which described what makes a "civilization." Literature, art, things like that. It's all wrong. What makes a civilization is disposable energy. Art and such are what make a civilization interesting, but without energy, you won't get the cultural stuff.
Energy comes in all sorts of forms--electrical energy (such as comes out of your wall socket), mechanical energy (a moving car has lots of that). Plus food energy. It was food energy--as in farming--that caused the first civilizations to arise. Then, and only then, were there enough spare calories (a unit of energy, if you remember your Earth Science classes) to support the people needed to create culture. Hunter-gatherers could have songs and oral tradition, but no more. Real culture--the kind with books, for instance--requires farming....There were a lot of songs protesting farm conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (things like Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat)....
"The Farmer Is the Man" is a venerable folksong of the plains, with origins at least as far back as the Populist movement of the 1890s, when it appeared in Farmers Alliance songbooks and was sung by Alliance glee clubs."
Day 172 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
A great song, honed over 120 years and still applicable.
Sandburg writes: "Fragments of this were heard in Illinois in the early 1890’s. S. K Barlow, a Galesburg milk-man who used to be a fiddler at country dances near Galva, sang it for me as we washed eight-and two-gallon delivery cans and quart-measure cups on winter afternoons. W. W. Delaney said, "As near as I remember that song came out in the 1860's, just after the war.""
ADDITIONAL NOTE: (from THE FARMER IS THE MAN (Bob Waltz), Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, August 2006.
I recently read a book on history which described what makes a "civilization." Literature, art, things like that. It's all wrong. What makes a civilization is disposable energy. Art and such are what make a civilization interesting, but without energy, you won't get the cultural stuff.
Energy comes in all sorts of forms--electrical energy (such as comes out of your wall socket), mechanical energy (a moving car has lots of that). Plus food energy. It was food energy--as in farming--that caused the first civilizations to arise. Then, and only then, were there enough spare calories (a unit of energy, if you remember your Earth Science classes) to support the people needed to create culture. Hunter-gatherers could have songs and oral tradition, but no more. Real culture--the kind with books, for instance--requires farming....There were a lot of songs protesting farm conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (things like Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat)....
"The Farmer Is the Man" is a venerable folksong of the plains, with origins at least as far back as the Populist movement of the 1890s, when it appeared in Farmers Alliance songbooks and was sung by Alliance glee clubs."
