Hanging Out the Linen Clothes
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 20/05/2020

Day 65 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

Sandburg writes: "From break of day till set of sun, woman's work is never done. In those days there was linen.  And woman took thought about her clothes. Six days she toiled and smoothed and fashioned her  linen garb and vestment, and all the time she hoped to look good and seem fair and acceptable in  the eyes of her "darling" who, the song says, saw her at work. 

"He regarded her all the more highly  because she was a working girl fixing her own clothes. Grandmothers of the present generation of Californians sang this over wash-tubs and ironing boards, over the needles as they stitched and  hemmed. Thus we have it from Pauline Jacobson and friends in San Francisco."