by Peter Berryman
As I Tread the Drear Wild
The other day, I had the thrill of talking with the exquisitely talented folk singer and songwriter Anne Hills about favorite song themes. She told me that she is a great fan of songs about home, which came as no surprise, considering that her song Follow That Road is one of the prettiest home-feeling songs you'll ever hear, even though it never actually uses the word "home":
If you're coming in the summer, you'd be better to split off on thirty five
There's the Starlight Drive-in Movie on your left, just beyond the county line.
Right after that you'll see two silos, one is silver, one is blue
'Bout a quarter mile further, make a left onto Highway Forty TwoThen follow that road; cornfields just as far as you can see
Follow that road, back through time, back through distance, back to me...--©1993 Anne Hills
If I had to guess, I'd say that there are more songs about home than about any other single topic, except maybe for love. And many love songs are home songs too, including Anne's song, and traditional ditties like Little Brown Jug:
My wife and I live all alone
In a little brown hut we call our own
She loves gin & I love rum
Tell you what, don't we have fun --Author unknown
...and Old Chisolm Trail:
Goin to sell my hoss, goin to sell my saddle
Tell my boss where to go with his cattle
Goin back to town to draw my money
Goin back home to see my honey --Author unknown
There are songs that use the concept of "home" as more of a situation than a place, like Tom Paxton's Bottle of Wine, in which "home" seems like a fondly recalled sobriety:
Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine
When you gonna let me get sober
Leave me alone, let me go home
Let me go back and start over --Tom Paxton, ©1963 UAMC inc.
And sometimes "home" means an imagined home in the future,
either literally, as in the wonderful showtune Wouldn't It
Be Loverly
All I want is a room somewhere
Far away from the cold night air
With one enormous chair
Oh wouldn't it be loverly --Lerner & Loewe, ©1956:
...Or in a more fantasized future, as in Somewhere Over The Rainbow by Harburg & Arlen. Even further in the future, "home" often refers to an afterlife, as in Big Rock Candy Mountain or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, ...comin' for to carry me home. (both Trad.)
But I think most frequently, songs about home are written about an actual remembered place (though if you read between the lines, they're also about youth left behind) as in Sweet Sunny South:
Take me back to the place where I first saw the light
To my sweet sunny south take me home
Where the wild birds sing me to sleep every night
O why was I tempted to roam? --Author unknown
Incidentally, I wonder how many songs rhyme "home" with "roam"? Seems like it's either that or "foam," as in Irving Berlin's God Bless America's the oceans, white with foam or Irving King's drunken Show Me the Way to Go Home, o'er land or sea or foam. Sea or foam? I wonder what "foam" means in that case, if not "sea"? Styrofoam, maybe.
Official state songs are usually home songs, like Home Means Nevada, by Bertha Raffetto, or Washington My Home, by Helen Davis. The Kansas state song is Home On The Range. I've never heard the somewhat conversational song written for Rhode Island by Charlie Hall and Maria Day, but I like the lyrics:
Rhode Island, oh Rhode Island
Surrounded by the sea.
Some people roam the earth for home;
Rhode Island's It for Me. --Hall and Day
Quaint state motto: "This Is It For Me."
At least TWO songs were written by Stephen Foster and later adopted by the featured states as their state songs: Old Folks At Home (Swanee River) is one of Florida's state songs, and My Old Kentucky Home is Kentucky's.
Foster wrote quite a few songs about longing for home. In his day, writing about home was all the rage. So many people had immigrated to the US, never to see their homes again, and so many of THOSE folks were moving westward, leaving their new homes for gold or farmland, that everyone seemed transfixed by home songs. From what I have read, one of the extremely popular (to this day) songs that started the craze was the song Home Sweet Home by John Payne (lyrics) and Henry Bishop (music). Written in the 1820s, it soon became a hit, and stayed one for a long time.
Home Sweet Home seems to have started a whole two hundred year passion for home songs. And you have to admit, the song is a masterpiece. Even the lyrics by themselves, without that glorious melody, are astonishing, in their own sentimental way:
'Mid pleasures and palaces
Though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble,
There's no place like home.
A charm from the skies
Seems to hallow us there,
Which seek thro' the world,
Is ne'er met with elsewhere.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There's no place like home,
There's no place like home.I gaze on the moon
As I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother
Now thinks of her child;
As she looks on that moon
From our own cottage door,
Thro' the woodbine whose fragrance
Shall cheer me no more.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There's no place like home,
There's no place like home.An exile from home,
Splendor dazzles in vain,
Oh, give me my lowly
Thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gaily,
That came at my call:
Give me them and that
Peace of mind, dearer than all.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There's no place like home,
There's no place like home. --Payne & Bishop
I'll bet ol' Jim Berryman himself crooned that sad song soon after deboating in Philadelphia, displaced by the Irish Potato Famine of 160 years ago.