Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.
This is Carl Sandburg singing “Wanderin'”:
Earlier this week I read from my forthcoming novella, Sing for Life: Tin Pan Alley at Colgate University. One of the songs that serves as a focal point in that novella, and also in my first novel, Owen Noone and the Marauder, is “Wanderin'”. This Carl Sandburg version is my favorite. In his book New American Songbag, the poet, singer, folksong collector, socialist and Lincoln biographer writes of this song:
“It is a lyric of tough days. The pulsation is gay till the contemplative pauses, the wishes and lingerings, of that final line of each verse, and the prolonged vocalizing of ‘l-i-k-e.’ The philosophy is desperate as the old sailor saying, ‘To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all, would be too damned hard.'”
