{"id":1832,"date":"2019-04-19T08:48:25","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T07:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/douglascowie.com\/?p=1832"},"modified":"2019-04-18T11:04:30","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T10:04:30","slug":"song-of-the-week-dinks-song-by-andrea-van-kampen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/?p=1832","title":{"rendered":"Song of the Week: &#8220;Dink&#8217;s Song&#8221; by Andrea Van Kampen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Each Friday I pick a song\u2013new, old, borrowed, blue\u2013that\u2019s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is &#8220;Dink&#8217;s Song&#8221; by Andrea Van Kampen:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<p class=\"responsive-video-wrap clr\"><iframe title=\"Dink&#039;s Song\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6wrgRSJ2Lx4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;Dink&#8217;s Song&#8221; is a folk song that I first came across in <em>The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs<\/em> by Alan Lomax. In his notes, Lomax writes that a woman at a levee camp on the Brazos River sang the song for his mother in the early 1900s, and he describes it as &#8220;part blues, part British lyric, and all perfection.&#8221; There&#8217;s <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"a hotel tapes Bob Dylan version of it (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HsEhUIZKaTM\" target=\"_blank\">a hotel tapes Bob Dylan version of it<\/a>, and at the end of that version, Dylan claims to have heard it from a woman named Dink, which strikes me as some classic Dylan mythmaking\/bullshit (I don&#8217;t mean that unkindly). <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=338hp19HWpE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Dave Van Ronk sings it (opens in a new tab)\">Dave Van Ronk sings it<\/a>, too, and there&#8217;s a <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"Jeff Buckley version (opens in a new tab)\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7pp5KYEQfTY\" target=\"_blank\">Jeff Buckley version<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The thing about all those versions by dudes, is they&#8217;re all pretty fast and, for lack of a better term, aggressive. They&#8217;re all shouting their &#8220;fare thee wells,&#8221; like if they don&#8217;t yell it down the line or valley or whatever, she won&#8217;t hear, and, to my ear anyway, it flattens the emotion of the words and tune. I learned to play this song from the book, long before I&#8217;d ever heard a version of it, and so always followed the instruction, &#8220;slow, with pathos,&#8221; which is more in line with the way Andrea Van Kampen plays it, and which is partly why I like her version so much. She emphasizes the longing, the pathos, and she places the ache of the song somewhere deeper than just I&#8217;m sad because my lover is up and gone. I also think the song is much more interesting positioned from the point of view of a woman than just another man lamenting a lady that&#8217;s left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Although there&#8217;s quite a bit of overlap, the lyrics of all of these versions also depart pretty widely from the one in the book, which is neither here nor there, really, but suggests a certain amount of (self-?) censorship in the Lomax version. <\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"StumbleUpon\",\"Digg\",\"Reddit\",\"Bebo\",\"Delicious\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_twitter_via=\"DouglasCowie\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Song%20of%20the%20Week%3A%20%22Dink%27s%20Song%22%20by%20Andrea%20Van%20Kampen\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Each Friday I pick a song\u2013new, old, borrowed, blue\u2013that\u2019s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it. This is &#8220;Dink&#8217;s Song&#8221; by Andrea Van Kampen: &#8220;Dink&#8217;s Song&#8221; is a folk song that I first came across in The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs by Alan Lomax. In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"StumbleUpon\",\"Digg\",\"Reddit\",\"Bebo\",\"Delicious\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_twitter_via=\"DouglasCowie\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Song%20of%20the%20Week%3A%20%22Dink%27s%20Song%22%20by%20Andrea%20Van%20Kampen\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-song-of-the-week","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1834,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglascowie.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}