I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground
| "'I Wish I Was a Mole In the Ground'" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Bascom Lamar Lunsford | |
| Released | 1928 |
| Genre | Roots and Folk music |
| Label | Brunswick Records |
| Songwriter(s) | traditional |
I Wish I Was a Mole In the Ground is a traditional American folk song. It was most famously recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928 for Brunswick Records in Ashland, Kentucky. Harry Smith included "Mole" on his Anthology of American Folk Music released by Folkways Records in 1952. The notes for Smith's Anthology state that Lunsford learnt this song from Fred Moody, a North Carolina neighbor in 1901.
Lunsford said of this song:
The title of this mountain banjo song is "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground." I've known it since 1901 when I heard Fred Moody, then a high school boy, sing it down in Burke County. Fred lives in Haywood County, North Carolina, and the footnote to the song is that the "bend" referred to is the bend of the Pigeon River in Haywood County, North Carolina. I played it as a request of my mother back in 1902. It was the last request she ever made of me. I was teaching that time at Doggett's Gap at public school in Madison County, and returned to my school on Sunday evening. She was interested in my picking the banjo, and she asked me to get the five-string banjo down and play "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground." I went away, and she grew sick and passed away and that was the last request she ever made of me.
In his notes for "Mole", supplied with the Anthology in 1952, Smith disagrees about the meaning of "The Bend" when he wrote:
The narrator's wish to be a mole in the ground and a lizzard [sic] in the spring are quite surrealistic in their symbolism. "The Bend" ("pen" in some other versions) probably refers to the Big Bend penitentiary. In an earlier version of this song (Okeh, 1925) the banjo is even more remarkable in its halting rhythms, and the singer decided he would "rather be a lizzard [sic]..." Lunsford, a lawyer of Asheville, North Carolina, writes that this song is a typical product of the Pigeon River Valley.
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