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[LefthandedJeff] The Forever Farewell in Folk Songs

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For the hundreds of years through which our folk songs developed, farewells could well mean forever. You can hear that melancholy, that longing, the fatalism of that almost certain grief, in folk song after folk song. I’ve thought about this a lot while listening to the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack over and over.

If I had wings like Noah’s dove
I’d fly the river to the one I love.
Fare thee well, my honey
Fare thee well.

For hundreds of years, long journeys meant horseback, or wagon, or ship, through wild lands or over rough seas. Relatively recently, it could mean a train. That lonesome whistle haunts many a blues.

Long journeys meant days and weeks and months of danger and uncertainty. They meant permanent change. Not just a change of landscape, climate and home, but the changes that come from traumatic parting and long separation, and falling in with strangers, and the struggles, compulsions and compromises of survival far from home and family.

You leave to find adventure or blaze a trail to a new home and you might not bargain for how your soul meets the journey and the journey bends your soul. To leave for that long and travel that far meant to never return the same person, if you could ever return at all.

If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles…
Lord I’m one, lord I’m two, lord I’m three, lord I’m four,
Lord I’m five hundred miles away from home…
Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name,
Lord I can’t go back home this a-way.

There’s a mournful song that Marcus Mumford sings in Another Day, Another Time, the concert featuring many of the players from Llewyn Davis. He’s all alone on stage. The singer has been gone from his home for years. He’s ashamed that he’s never written to his family. He gets word that his father has died and his sisters have gone wrong. But he’s afraid he can’t go home as he is. We don’t know what he’s done while he’s been gone, but we know he’s seen and done some serious things, and he’s forever changed. The man who left can never return because he no longer exists. When he said goodbye he may not have known it, but it was the Forever Farewell.

I’m going away to leave you, love
I’m going away for awhile
But I’ll return to you sometime
If I go ten thousand miles

Think about it. Really put yourself back there. No email, no cell phones. No text messages to make an instant connection, convey an everyday casual or urgent thought. No Facebook for Check-ins and Status Updates and to share the images of your journey. No Skype. Perhaps if you weren’t separated by an ocean or a frontier, you could write letters; perhaps they might even ultimately make it to their destination. But you might truly never ever see the ones you loved alive again ever on Earth.

It’s fare thee well my own true lover,
I never expect to see you again.
For I’m bound to ride that northern railroad,
Perhaps I’ll die upon this train.

You can see what a consoling thought it would be that one day you’d be reunited with your loved ones after death.

Maybe your friends think I’m just a stranger,
My face you’ll never see no more.
But there is one promise that is given,
I’ll meet you on God’s golden shore.

There are many themes in old folk songs, and the Forever Farewell is just one of them. But it’s certainly a frequent one. And the long journey is really our foundational American myth—from the Pilgrims in the Mayflower to the wagon trains west. Our great, grand central story is the story of the road. With the journey, with the road, comes the toll on the heart that it takes.

So you can also see how revelatory the book and the journeys depicted in On the Road were, in the mid 50s. By then we had cars fast enough and hardy enough to take us all the way out to the Western horizon and then back again, and the roads to carry us. We could zoom from the sunrise to the sunset and bounce right off of it back into the arms of the sunrise. The story was no longer about the Toll of the Heart from migration. It was the ecstasy of the journey and return, journey and return. A whole new American rhythm, fast and triumphant. You got the adventure, and yes, a journey still meant inner change. But without the same grief. Without the cost of the Forever Farewell. So it became a celebratory and revelatory journey. The foundational American road myth had its celestial catharsis.

It winds from Chicago to LA
More than two thousand miles all the way
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.

So to bring this meditation on the Forever Farewell in Folk Songs back around, think about how the 50s freedom from the Toll of the Heart that was the Forever Farewell eased into the 60s folk song revival. In the 60s, it was now safe, even cozy, to look back with a melancholy nostalgia to the costs of the journeys sung about in those songs. The middle-aged buyers of Peter, Paul & Mary and Kingston Trio records; and the young folk singers like Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan, all partook of that shared cultural reflection for the time that already seemed distant and receding like the train whistle a hundred miles, two hundred miles, five hundred years away.

[Songs quoted, in order: Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song), Five Hundred Miles, The Storms are on the Ocean, Man of Constant Sorrow, Route 66. Image credit: Found the photo at http://derlandstreicher.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/down-by-the-railraod-tracks/.]

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  • Eric

    I love this. Certainly one of the most evocative themes in folk music- makes me thing of Brokedown Palace- always one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs- “fare thee well/fare thee well/I love you more than words can tell” – that sense of what has been left behind, what has been lost in the name of relentless motion. It’s a notion of consequence that doesn’t exist now- though, in more subtle ways, there is still a price to be paid when you leave a place never to return permanently.

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      Yes! A notion of consequence. Preserved in song, as so much is. I like bringing the Dead into this, too, their music is so rooted in all those old song traditions.

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      In my time/in my time/I will roll roll roll

  • Eric

    Then you get the slightly angrier version with Dylan:
    When your rooster crows at the break of dawn

    Look out your window and I’ll be gone

    You’re the reason I’m trav’lin’ on

    Don’t think twice, it’s all right

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      Yeah, maybe that’s the Forever F-You.

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      Or the Forever Farewell and Good Riddance.

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      Or the Forever F-You and the Horse You Rode In On.

  • Cynthia Brando

    Are you going to get me to like this movie now?!

    • Cynthia Brando

      I don’t know how to navigate in this forum obviously…..there is now a giant picture of me here for some reason…..

      • Cynthia Brando

        Yes…..it is a great movie simply for its’ historical perspective and influence on future generations; a spirited documentary if you will…..and there were some great parts in it that made me smile, like when he hitched all that way and sang his heart out only for the producer to tell him, “I don’t see any money here”, and the freak out over asking to play at a dinner party…..all stuff any working musician can relate to…….

    • Lefthanded Jeff

      Ah! Cynthia. Just saw that you posted this comment. Sorry I was delinquent about noticing. For some reason I don’t get automatically notified.

      I hope I get you to like the movie now! But I’ll settle for the soundtrack. Soundtrack’s lovely. Even people who don’t like the movie seem to love the soundtrack.