I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground: A Song History

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This banjo song is tied above all to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the folk-music collector who organized Asheville's Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, first held in 1928.[1] Lunsford said he had known it since 1901, when he heard a high-school boy named Fred Moody sing it in Burke County, and he regarded it as a characteristic banjo song of the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge region.[2] He recorded it for OKeh in 1924[2][3] and again in 1928, this time for Brunswick at a session in Ashland, Kentucky; the Brunswick record was issued as number 219.[4][2][3]

1939 photograph of a mountain field dotted with corn shocks below the Blue Ridge near Black Mountain, North Carolina

Marion Post Wolcott, “General landscape near Black Mountain, North Carolina,” photograph, September 1939. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The song was not Lunsford's alone. The Traditional Ballad Index dates its earliest report to 1921, from the Brown collection, and lists versions from the Midwest, the Southeast and the South, along with a Green Bailey record issued in 1929.[3] Apart from the burrowing wish of the title, the singer grumbles about Kempy, a woman with costly habits, and about drinking or legal trouble; the Index cross-references it with related songs such as "New River Train" and "I Don't Like No Railroad Man."[3] The title also appears in folklorist Vance Randolph's list of traditional Ozark fiddle tunes, published in 1954.[5]

Lunsford's 1928 Brunswick side reached a new generation when Harry Smith included it in the third volume, Songs, of his Anthology of American Folk Music, issued by Folkways in 1952.[4][6] The Anthology proved enormously influential on later musicians; Dave Van Ronk recalled, "The Anthology was our bible."[6] The song is track 63 of the 1997 Smithsonian Folkways reissue.[7] Revival and old-time musicians have kept it in circulation, among them Mike Seeger in 1992 and Elizabeth LaPrelle in 2007.[4]

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Sources

  1. NCpedia: "Mountain Dance and Folk Festival".
  2. Open Music Archive: "Parallel Anthology Track 63".
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground (Roud 4957)".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Mole in the Ground".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Anthology of American Folk Music".
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" (Bascom Lamar Lunsford).