Man Goin' Round
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-12-19

Day 276 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

New Chapter: Lovely People

Sandburg writes: "At first glance this may seem a whimsical reference to the census taker going from door to door and taking the names of all people without regard to sex, color, race, or previous condition of servitude. Then we come to the line, “an' he leave my heart in pain,” and we know it is a more august and austere Enumerator than any employed in the transient and temporal governments of man.

Each verse deals with a relative, mother, father, sister, brother, or other dear one, checked off from the list of the living. A true instance of the poetry “to be overheard rather than heard,” it keeps for those of long acquaintance with it, an overtone of a reverie on the riddles of death and the frail permits by which any one generation walks before the mirrors of life. I heard it in Columbia, South Carolina, sung for a group including Julia Peterkin, Danny and Isadora Bennett Read, and Prof, and Mrs. Taylor in whose family Rebecca, the singer, was a servant since a child. Rebecca was far in years but had a young singing heart and a clear singing voice. She was bashful, hesitant, at times, about going on with the songs, giving a silvery chuckle with a sidewise turn of her head as she took up the lines of a new song. There were moments when I felt about this homely, rather slightly built, black woman, the strength of earth and the patience of large, slow-changing landscapes."