Number 37, November 1, 2022

Many years ago, when I was first discovering the work of Jean Ritchie, I stumbled on a CD of her live album from 1962, “Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City.”  I had known of course about Doc Watson for sure, since I was a bluegrass specialist.  But I didn’t know much about Jean Ritchie.  This album introduced her to me, and my artistic life was changed forever.

The song “Go Dig My Grave” was a profound part of this album and it among others captured my attention.  Always one to gravitate to tragedy, I heard this ballad of a love-struck young woman who decides to lose her life in her grief for the lost attention of “the railroad boy” as a cry of mortal anguish.  It portrays a real tragedy and, sadly, one we can still relate to in this day and age.

When I met Jean and we worked together on our stage show “Singing the Moon Up: The Voice of Jean Ritchie,” she told me about how the Ritchie family collected songs in their communities and added to them through the generations.  This song was also widely known by alternate titles “The Butcher Boy” or “The Railroad Boy,” and had been collected by the family.  Jean added lyrics to her version of the ballad and re-named it “Go Dig My Grave.”  On her recording, Doc’s rolling banjo is truly haunting.

You can find the album here at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

When we adapted Jean’s book “Singing Family of the Cumberlands” for our tribute show “Singin’ The Moon Up,” we quoted from the book itself to introduce this song.   Fitting for the Day of the Dead, Dia De Los Muertos, here is a story about the living and the dead existing on the same plane:  the tragic young woman who ends her life because of a lost love, and Jean Ritchie as a 12-year-old girl, realizing her place in the universe and her existential fear of the profound solitude of the human soul.

“One day when the family was going down out of the cornfields, I fell behind the others. I came upon a little rise and there were two hills of corn growing rank and tall up out of it. I stood between the two hills, as in a green doorway. The late evening sun slanted straight against my face. I reached out my hands on both sides and held the rich bursting stalks, feeling them sway and stretch with life. I wondered whether any other person in the world had ever stood just so and thought these things about stalks of corn? I said aloud, “I will never forget this time! It is the 30th day of July 1935 and I am Jean Ritchie who is 12 years old and is standing among the beautiful green corn!

A lump rose up in my throat, my power to feel things and my eloquence was overpowering to me. I wondered if any other girl twelve years old had ever stood still and captured a moment of time like that, knowing what she was doing, and if that girl had ever made a speech about such a common thing as cornstalks. All of a sudden I felt a great fear. No one was so alone as I was, no one was so different.”

GO DIG MY GRAVE

Well I be gone these lonesome days
I return again, here’s what I say
Go dig my grave, both wide and deep
Place a marble stone at my head and my feet

Oh lord, oh lord, oh Lordy me
Oh lord, oh lord, oh Lordy me

She went upstairs to make her bed
And not one word to her mama said
Her mama she went upstairs too
Says daughter oh daughter what troubles you?

Oh, Mama dear, I cannot tell
That railroad boy I loved so well
He courted me my life away
And now with me he will not stay

Her papa he come home from work
Says where’s my daughter she seemed so hurt
He went upstairs just give her hope
And he found her hanging from a rope

Well he took his knife and he cut her down
And in her bosom these words he found
Go dig my grave both wide and deep
Place a marble stone at my head and at my feet
And on my breast, place a small white dove
To tell the world I died for love

Oh lord, oh lord, oh Lordy me
Oh lord, oh lord, or Lordy me

Thanks for reading!   See you next time for all things Folk Diva.  If you have a suggestion for a blog topic let me know.  You can email me HERE:  newfolkfusion@gmail.com

Love and Blessings,

Susie

________________________________________________
Award-winning recording artist, Broadway singer, journalist, educator and critically-acclaimed powerhouse vocalist, Susie Glaze has been called “one of the most beautiful voices in bluegrass and folk music today” by Roz Larman of KPFK’s Folk Scene.  LA Weekly voted her ensemble Best New Folk in their Best of LA Weekly for 2019, calling Susie “an incomparable vocalist.”  “A flat out superb vocalist… Glaze delivers warm, amber-toned vocals that explore the psychic depth of a lyric with deft acuity and technical perfection.”  As an educator, Susie has lectured at USC Thornton School of Music and Cal State Northridge on “Balladry to Bluegrass,” illuminating the historical path of ancient folk forms in the United Kingdom to the United States via immigration into the mountains of Appalachia.  Susie has taught workshops since 2018 at California music camps RiverTunes and Vocáli Voice Camp.  She is a current specialist in performance and historian on the work of American folk music icon, Jean Ritchie.  Susie now offers private voice coaching online via the Zoom platform.   www.susieglaze.com