Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 6 days ago
Day 148 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
A fragment of this song was published in 1929 but was full-voiced in 1927 by Sandburg...and which no extant recording exists, by anyone (at least that I can find).
Sandburg writes: "This arrangement is based on the song as heard at the Wisconsin Players' House in Milwaukee, where it arrived through an Oklahoma poet named Ellis, who heard it from African/Americans in the cotton fields of Texas. It is an early blues, not to be hurried in its rendition; if you feel like giving it very slow and very draggy that is the way for you to give it; it is a massive, lugubrious gargoyle of a song."
Day 148 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series
A fragment of this song was published in 1929 but was full-voiced in 1927 by Sandburg...and which no extant recording exists, by anyone (at least that I can find).
Sandburg writes: "This arrangement is based on the song as heard at the Wisconsin Players' House in Milwaukee, where it arrived through an Oklahoma poet named Ellis, who heard it from African/Americans in the cotton fields of Texas. It is an early blues, not to be hurried in its rendition; if you feel like giving it very slow and very draggy that is the way for you to give it; it is a massive, lugubrious gargoyle of a song."
