Old-timey songwriter Craig Johnson met an ex-logger in a bar one evening, they got talking and it turned into a song. Johnson, who died in 2009, has a Bandcamp page where you can find it. Easier, though, to watch Bruce Molsky on YouTube:
It’s a track from Molsky’s 2013 album If it ain’t here when I get back.
Notice the verse form, with the interwoven refrain. We’re used to it from sea shanties, from Christmas Carols like I saw three ships, even from Da Doo Ron Ron. But it’s not common any more, and unusual for being sustained over eight lines, not four:
Sit down buddy, we’ll drink and smoke
Oh woman, don’t you weep for me
My hands can’t fiddle and my heart’s been broke
You damned old piney mountain
Lost my fingers in the Galax Mill
Buddy sing a sad old song
And my heart got broke in the yew pine hills
Lord and my time ain’t long
The way the old man talks is laconic, short on self-pity:
I started out to loggin’ when I was in my prime
Hitchin’ up the spruce to the big drag lines
Where the skidders start a-buckin’ as the years come down
Making God’s own thunder on the new-cut ground
The emotional words — weep, damned, sad — are in the refrain, and at first they slide past, but that’s where Johnson’s skill shows itself: gradually, the weight and drama increase — and it’s those repeated lines that do the work, slowing the pace at which the story unfolds and becoming more emphatic each time we hear them.
We was fighting over nothing and drinking too hard
Riding up to camp on the flat wheel car
30 years a-hanging on the old chain break
Laid off and paid off in ’58
And the skidders got sold to a scrap iron yard
I moved down Virginia when the times got hard
Lost my fingers to a steel bandsaw
Now my fiddle just hangs un-tuned on the wall
The work dried up. He moved away, left his girl behind which broke his heart, lost fingers in a workplace accident so can’t play fiddle any more. Nothing in his short time remaining but whisky and cigarettes.
And the trees have grown up on the logging road
And wild flowers bloomed where the big shays blowed
There’s nothing left for me but to drink and smoke
My hands can’t fiddle and my heart’s been broke.
It’s a song that leaves behind it a moment of stunned quiet.
