Wanderin'  (A)
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 10/07/2020

Day 116 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Carl Sandburg, collected the song from Arthur Sutherland of Rochester, NY, as learned from comrades in the American Relief Expedition to the Near East in the 1920’s. 

The year after Sandburg’s American Songbag was published, Vernon Dalhart made two recording, one on 29 Sept 1928 and the other on 23 October 1928. 

Sandburg writes: "It is a lyric of tough  days. The pulsation is gay till the contemplative pauses, the wishes and the lingerings, of that final  line of each verse, and the prolonged vocalizing of "l-i-k-e." 

The philosophy is desperate as the  old sailor saying, "To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to hell after all, would be  too damned hard."