TheBWJohnson's video: Sarah Ogan Gunning - Oh Death

A Girl Of Constant Sorrow I heard Sarah Ogan sing her songs about getting together and shaking hands, organizing around this whole world once, and twice. I heard her sing, "I'm going to write you a letter just as quick as times get better." But, "I've got to get organized, Baby Mine." Sarah had no guitar, and lots of times Jim did not play behind her. Leadbelly might not play for her first verse or so. I had to keep my guitar still so I could hear the words. In the whole crowded room of all tones and colors of faces and eyes, it was a high feeling when Sarah would set forward on the couch and sing in her natural voice and key with no music box to back her up. I heard her voice, dry as my own, thin, high, and in her nose, with the old outdoors and down the mountain sound to it. Singing out to her skies had made her voice a thin one, but with that unknown gift of carrying up and out to the several directions. Singing to us as she had sung into the rifle fire of Sheriff Blair's deputies, Sarah Ogan got the house of people to keep so still that the cat licking his hair sounded like a broomstick rubbed against a washtub. Sarah's case of TB was worse than Jim's. Hers was in a deeper and later stage, and she sang and her eyes said as much as her song. She told us how the deputy caught her in the dark of night stealing a sack of coal off of the mine dump. He pulled his pistol and said that he would shoot her if he caught her there stealing coal again. Sarah said, Oil your pistol up good, Mister Deputy, I'll be right back here on this dump tomorrow night carrying home a sack to keep my kids from freezing. I heard Sarah, and I watched every move she made.... And then I said, yes, Sarah, you are fighting the people I hate, the sicknesses that we all hate, the causers and the carriers of the worst of all wordly [sic] illnesses, this profit system to feed the monopoly machine that is choking every solitary one of us, so that we can't sing, can't dance, can't meet, can't talk, can't argue and make our own plans, can't lead the human life.... Woody Guthrie, "LEADBELLY is a hard name," American Folksong, New York, NY, 1961 (reprint of 1947 edition), pp. 11-12. house photo: Nancy Rexroth