Recordings & Info: 7La. Dink's Song
Dink's Song:
Dink's Song John Lomax LOC Recording 2088 B2; 1936 Charles Seeger
Fare Thee Well Libby Holman with Josh White 1942 First release
Fare Thee Well Josh White 1944
Dink's Song Cisco Houston 1954 Hard Travelin'
Fare Thee Well, Oh Honey Terrea Lea 1957
Fare Thee Well Herta Marshall 1957
Dink's Song Jack Elliott 1958
Fare Thee Well Harry Belafonte 1958
Dink's Song Leon Bibb 1959
Dink's Song Pete Seeger 1959
Fare Thee Well Bill McAdoo sings with guitar 1959 Folkways
Barbara Dane, 1959 Folk Festival at Newport
Fare Thee Well, O Honey Burl Ives 1960
Dink's Blues Jack McDuff 1961
Dink's Song Dave Van Ronk 1961
Dink's Song Bonnie Dobson February 1962
Dink's Song Carolyn Hester 1962
If I Had Wings Odetta 1962
Dink's Song Judi Resnick 1963
Faretheewell (Dink's Song) The Limeliters 1963
Nora's Dove (Dinks Song) The Big 3 1963
Dinks Blues The Simon Sisters 1964
Dink's Blues Benji Aronoff 1965
Dink's Song Catherine McKinnon 1965
Faretheewell (Fred's Tune) Fred Neil February 1967
Dink's Song Cliff Aungier 1967
Fare Thee Well Julie Felix 1968
Fare Thee Well Tony Rice 1984
Dink's Song Roger McGuinn with Pete Seeger and Josh White Jr. 2001
Dink's Song Jeff Buckley September 2, 2003
Dink's Song Gabriel Rios November 22, 2007
Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song) Oscar Isaac & Marcus Mumford September 24, 2013
Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song) Oscar Isaac & Marcus Mumford with Punch Brothers January 13, 2015
Fare Thee Well (10,000 Miles) Annie Moses Band September 2015
Dink, published in 1934 in American Ballads and Folksongs (ABFS). The lyrics in the Digital Tradition are almost the same as what's in ABFS, but the DT has plain English instead of the inauthentic-sounding dialect that's in the Lomax book. Here's the entry from the traditional Ballad Index:
Dink's Song
DESCRIPTION: Chorus: Fare thee well/Oh, honey, fare thee well." Floating verses: "If I had wings like Noah's dove/I'd fly 'cross the river to the man I love"; "When I wore my apron low..." "One of these days... You'll look for me, and I'll be gone"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1908 (collected by John Lomax)
KEYWORDS: nonballad lyric pregnancy love separation floatingverses
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Lomax-FSUSA 21, "Dink's Song" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lomax-ABFS, pp. 195-196, "Dink's Song" (1 text, 1 tune)
PSeeger-AFB, p. 88, "Dink's Song" (1 text, 1 tune)
Silber-FSWB, p. 186, "Dink's Song" (1 text)
DT, DINKSONG*
ADDITIONAL: Francis L. Utley, "'The Genesis and Revival of 'Dink's Song,''" article published 1966 in _Studies in Language and Literature in Honor of Margaret Schlauch_; republished on pp. 122-137 of Norm Cohen, editor, _All This for a Song_, Southern Folklife Collection, 2009
Roud #10057
RECORDINGS:
Pete Seeger, "Dink's Song" (on PeteSeeger24)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Careless Love" (floating lyrics)
cf. "Waly Waly (The Water is Wide)" (floating lyrics)
cf. "The Butcher Boy" [Laws P24] (floating lyrics)
NOTES: While this shares a great deal of material with the cross-referenced songs, the unique tune and chorus make me believe it deserves a separate entry. - PJS
It is, however, so close to "Careless Love" in its text that I may have classified some versions there. The reader is advised to check the entries for both songs. Given that it comes from the Lomaxes, I'm not sure I trust its origin, either. Supposedly it was collected from a prostitute who called herself "Dink."
Utley's article is less about Dink and the Lomaxes than about how the song was modified by performers in the folk revival -- an interesting commentary on what performers can do to a song. - RBW
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Lomax and Lomax, Best Loved American Folk Songs.
DINK'S SONG
Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)
Libby Holman with Josh White
First release by Libby Holman with Josh White (1942)
. . . is a beautiful Negro variant of "Careless Love. John A. Lomax tells how he found the song in 1904, when he made his first field trip for Harvard University:
"I found Dink scrubbing her man's clothes in the shade of their tent across the Brazos river from the A. & M. College in Texas. Professor James C. Nagle of the College faculty was the supervising engineer of a levee-building company and he had invited me to come along and bring my Edison recording machine. The Negroes were trained levee workers from the Mississippi River.
'Dink knows all the songs,' said her companion. But I did not find her helpful until I walked a mile to a farm commissary and bought her a pint of gin. As she drank the gin, the sounds from her scrubbing board increased in intensity and in volume. She worked as she talked: 'That little boy there ain't got no daddy an' he ain't got no name. I comes from Mississippi and we never saw these levee niggers, till us got here. I brung along my little boy. My man drives a four-wheel scraper down there where you see the dust risin'. I keeps his tent, cooks his vittles and washes his clothes. Some day Ize goin' to wrap up his wet breeches and shirts, roll 'em up in a knot, put 'em in the middle of the bed, and tuck down the covers right nice. Then I'm going on up the river where I belong.' She sipped her gin and sang and drank until the bottle was empty.
"The original Edison record of 'Dink's Song' was broken long ago, but not until all the Lomax family had learned the tune. The one-line refrain, as Dink sang it in her soft lovely voice, gave the effect of a sobbing woman, deserted by her man. Dink's tune is really lost; what is left is only a shadow of the tender, tragic beauty of what she sang in the sordid, bleak surroundings of a Brazos Bottom levee camp.
"The lyrics and music of Dink's Song' are to me uniquely beautiful. Professor Kittredge praised them without stint. Carl Sandburg compares them to the best fragments of Sappho. As you might expect, Carl prefers Dink to Sappho.
"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.'
1. Ef I had wings like Norah's dove,
I'd fly up de river to de man I love.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
2. Ize got a man an' he's long an' tall,
Moves his body like a cannon ball.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
3. One uh these days, an' it won't be long,
Call my name an' I'll be gone.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
4. 'Member one night, a-drizzlin' rain,
Roun' my heart I felt a pain.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
5. When I wo' my ap'on low,
Couldn't keep you from my do'.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
6. Now I wears my ap'on high,
Sca'cely ever see you.passin' by.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
7. Now my ap'on's up to my chin,
You pass my do' an' you won't come in.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
8. Ef I had listened to what my mama said,
I'd be at home in my mama's bed.
Fare thee well, O honey, fare thee well.
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American Ballads and Folk Songs - Page 195
John Avery Lomax, Alan Lomax - 1934 ]
Ef I had wings like Norah's dove, I'd fly up the river to the man I love.
1908 version as collected on the Brazos from Dink and reported in Lomax's Adventures (1947), p. 273.
Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era - Page 38
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1135467161
Paul Oliver - 2014 - Preview - More editions
Josh White, like other singers who have recorded it, called the theme "DINK's BLUEs," though John Lomax referred to it as "Dink's Song," and admitted that the tune to Dink's eight-bar blues was "lost." On the music transcription, Lomax noted
Fare the well blues
dink's blues
Later, in 1908, John Lomax collected a song from a Mississippi woman named Dink, who had been shipped out to
working with her man in a levee camp
(1867-1948)
t John Lomax's 1917 article about black folk music for _The Nation_, which you can do at google books, it's obvious that he's just running together different lyrics he's encountered as mishmash supposed "lengthy" songs, and that includes when he's explicitly attributing stuff in that article to this "Dink," who he later couldn't keep his story straight about what year he'd encountered.