DINK'S SONG
Created on 06/09/2005Latest update on 27/09/2023
Artist: Dink
Author: traditional
Year: 1904
One of father John A. Lomax' earliest recordings (with an Edison cylinder machine), but lost. Dink was a black beautiful woman, imported from Memphis to the levee camps of the Brazos River bottomlands in Texas to keep black levee workers out of the local pubs. At first she didn't like this white man's strange proposal, but a bottle of gin loosened her up. Cut while she kept washing her husband's clothes. Stunned, Lomax forgot to ask her for the title. Published in 1934 in American Ballads and Folk Songs.
Covers:
- 1942:
Libby Holman [as Fare Thee Well with Josh White on guitar for Decca; crediting Alston, which cannot be right: that's the author of another Fare Thee Well Honey Fare Thee Well by Georgia White from 1937]
- 1944:
Josh White [idem]
- 1950s:
Carl Sandburg [in his song collection The American Songbag]
- 1952:
Burl Ives [as Fare Thee Well O Honey and in '55 as Sad Man's Song]
- 1954:
- 1957:
- 1958:
- 1959:
- 1959:
- 1961:
Dave Van Ronk [inspired Dylan; as a single in '67]
- 1961:
Bob Dylan [Minnesota Hotel Tape and also on No Direction Home (Bootleg Series Vol. 7); like father Lomax he always told he learned this song from a woman named Dink]
- 1961:
Carolyn Hester [idem]
- 1961:
- 1961:
Jack McDuff [and in '63 as Dink's Blues]
- 1963:
Big 3 [with Tim Rose and Mama Cass, pre Mamas And Papas as Nora's Dove (Dink's Song)]
- 1963:
- 1963:
Joni Mitchell [as Fare Thee Well on her Archives Vol 1]
- 1964:
Bob Gibson [as Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)]
- 1964:
Tom Paxton [as Fare Thee Well, Cisco]
- 1966:
- 1967:
- 1978:
- 1993:
Jeff Buckley [live at Sin-é]
- 1999:
- 2001:
Roger McGuinn [with Pete Seeger and Josh White Jr.]
- 2004:
- 2004:
Joan Baez [also cut a live version with Dylan during the second Rolling Thunder Revue ('76)]
- 2007:
- 2013:
Oscar Isaac & Marcus Mumford [in film Inside Llewyn Davis]
