Megan and I went to Cannes last May with Stella and had a chance to see the new Cohen Brother’s film Inside Llewyn Davis, and as with a lot of great modern film makers the music stayed with me longer than the movie itself. I started looking into some of it and came across the old song Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song). Listening to it one evening I thought it strange that it was sung by men but had the line
I’ve got a man, he’s long and tall
Moves his body like a cannon ball
Fare thee well, oh my honey, fare thee well
Seeing that, I knew it must have been written by a woman and did some research, what I found was a story as good as the song. It goes:
There is a musical ethnographer named John Lomax and he is going around southern Texas recording slave songs on a new Edison recorder, the year is 1908. He goes into the levee-building outfit of the Mississippi River Delta, asks the boss there who the best singer in camp is, “That would be Dink” the boss says. Story goes that Dink came down the river from Memphis, shipped along with the mules and iron scrapers, treated like any other piece of cargo. John ambles down to the river, finds Dink washing her man’s clothes and inquires if he could record her singing some songs. Dink squinted against the sun and turned back saying, “Today ain’t my singin’ day.” Upon further urging Dink relents and mentions that a pint of gin might loosen her pipes. The pint of gin procured from the commissary and the Edison recorder on, Dink sings her haunting song of despair. A woman in need, left abandoned at her most vulnerable.
One of these days and it won’t be long
Call my name and I’ll be gone
Fare thee well, oh my honey, fare thee well
I remember one night, a drizzling rain
Round my heart I felt a pain
Fare thee well, oh my honey, fare thee well
Well Lomax took the song home and his family (the musical kind) loved it. They learned it by heart, sang it to each other, hummed it on Sunday’s. Played the Edison recording so much it broke, vanished forever. Years later Lomax goes down to the Levee asks around for Dink, has the pint of gin with him for good measure, “When I went to find her in Yazoo, Mississippi, some years later, her women friends, pointing to a nearby graveyard, told me, Dink’s done planted up there.’ I could find no trace of her little son who ‘didn’t have no name.’
And so Dink lives on, if only inside the parenthesis of a song title some 100 years later.
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