MovieChat Forums > A Face in the Crowd (1957) Discussion > Ten thousand miles from home...

Ten thousand miles from home...

posted 9 years ago by rigelmaccrikey
2 replies | jump to latest

This bit of a song bookends the film, but even with the power of the internet behind me, all I could find about it was an Anonymous poem:

"Ten thousand miles away from home
And I don't even know my name,
For thinkin' about the woman I love,
Ran away with another man.

I went down to the old depot,
The trains were a-passin' by;
Looked through the bars, saw the woman I love,
And I hung my head and cried.

Standing on the street corner,
And the girl I loved passed by;
She shrugged her shoulder and passed me by,
And I tucked my head and cried."

Certainly sounds like an old, old blues song. The way Andy Griffith sings in AFITC has always haunted me. I wish I could find out more about it.

If that was a nod, nod.

[–] wrlord2001 8 years ago

Yeah, Griffith brings incredible emotion to that simple song - rage, misery, heartache...

[–] soma-2 8 years ago

This song derives from an old "negro ballad" that dates back at least as far as 1900 and that later morphed into a family of convict/hobo songs. Over the years these songs have gone under many different names with completely different lyrics. An early popular version called "Waiting for a Train" was recorded in 1928 by Jimmie Rodgers.

Check out this 1925 version by Vernon Dalhart called "Wild and Reckless Hobo," in which the line "A thousand miles away from home, bumming a railroad train" appears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQRAuKTeDUA

Here's a summary of the song from a description of a Woody Guthrie version called "Poor Boy" (Woody also did a version called "Danville Girl"):

Track 1 – Poor Boy (MASTER MA 50)
There are probably as many titles for this traditional ballad – it tells a story, so it qualifies as such – as there are versions of the song. Folk song scholar Malcolm G. Laws in his Native American Balladry has catalogued this as “The Coon-Can Game” (Laws I 4) but also offers the following titles for it: “Poor Boy,” “Ten Thousand Miles Away from Home,” “As I Set Down to Play Tin Can,” and so on. Other versions have it as “I Got Mine” and “The Coon Crap Game.” (The definitive study of this tangled ballad is in Marina Bokelman’s UCLA master’s thesis of 1968, “The Coon Can Game.”) Guthrie T.Meade, Jr., Dick Spottswood, and Douglas S. Meade in their invaluable Country Music Sources (Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina Press, 2002) cite no fewer than forty commercial recordings of this ballad known throughout the Southeast and Southwest. Guthrie may have learned it from one of these records, or over the air, or from a local singer.Wherever, he makes it his own by using the truly evocative melody of the distinctly different song “Danville Girl.” (And complicates folk song scholarship even more.)

Source: http://www.airplaydirect.com/music/WoodyGuthrieDisc1/press.php

Here's a detailed chronology of this family of songs: http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/ballads/LH02.html

The version you've posted comes from Carl Sandburg's American Songbag (1927). That version was set to music by Ruth Crawford Seeger. Here are some alternate verses to that version:

I went down to the railroad
Where the big six-wheelers ran;
I saw my woman sitting there
In the arms of another man.

I stood on the street corner;
It was shortly after dark;
Along came a man with the woman I love,
And I stabbed him through the heart.

"Well it's please, Mr. Judge, now please, Mr. Judge,
It's what are you goin' to do with me?"
He says, "If I find you guilty, dear boy,
I'm goin' to send you to the penitentiary."