Our land is filled with mourning, from Bourbon to Malone
And many wives and mothers are weeping, sad and alone
Adapted from an old civil war poem turned folktale by Allison Kraus and Union Station, this is a folk song about an encounter between two old friends after a battle at Richmond during the Civil War- one victorious and one dying in the mud.
He said, “My noble comrade, you will miss me for awhile
But the faces that once loved us, again on you will smile
Again you will be foremost in all the village games
While I lie here at Richmond
Fair Richmond on the James”
It got me weeping the other day, and I’ve been listening to it over and over again to unpack why. There’s some kind of deep mortal truth here. The cost of war in grief. The reverberations and consequences of killing. The juxtaposition between the survivors and the fallen.
The prose is so rich and literary- a symbol of beauty, like Nature- and the steel guitar and banjo hurry along, steamrolling over the grief in the content of the words- again, Beautiful, again, just as Life and Nature does, without mercy or regard for our feelings, always.
Take the sword home to my brother, and the star upon my breast
To my young and gentle sister, the one that I loved best
And a brown lock from my forehead to my mother who still dreams
Of the safe return of her soldier boy
From Richmond on the James
When a man is killed, not only does all he has and all he’ll ever have get taken away. A mother loses a precious son. A brother loses his deepest partner. A sister loses her protective older brother. That’s why his mother gets some of his hair- the hair she would rake her fingers through as his mom, why his brother gets his signa of honor and loyalty- doubtless they were loyal and honorable to one another as brothers do. And the gentle sister gets his star, so that she might think of him looking down on her from above at night when it gets dark.
I don’t normally get down with folk. But this one stabs deep.
Loading comments...