The Chancey Brothers - I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground video free download

From the Art Of Field Recording Volume 2: Accompanied Songs And Ballads...Fifty Years Of Traditional American Music Documented By Art Rosenbaum

Recorded October 22, 1978, in Boardtown Community, Cherry Log, Gilmer County; Chesley Chancey, vocals and 5-string banjo; Joe Chancey, tenor vocal and guitar; Ralph Chancey, mandolin; Don Chancey, bass violin; Gene Wiggins and Art Rosenbaum, fiddles

This song was recorded in the twenties by North Carolinian Bascom Lamar Lunsford (re-issue on Folkways LP FA 2040.) Lunsford, in "Thirty And One Folksongs from The Southern Mountains," New York: Carl Fischer, 1929, pp. 10-11, wrote that this is "a fine type of indigenous American banjo song extant in the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountain region...and has numerous unrelated stanzas born out of the hilarity of mountain banjo picking." The Chancey's fine version with two-part harmony, is more regular in rhythm than Lunsford's." ~ by Art Rosenbaum

LYRICS:

Lord, I wish I was a mole in the ground,

Lord, I wish I was a mole in the ground;

A mole in the ground, turn this wide world around,

Lord, I wish I was a mole in the ground.

Lord, I wish I was a lizard in the spring,

Lord, I wish I was a lizard in the spring,

'F I's a lizard in the spring, I could hear my darlin' sing,

Lord, I wish I was a lizard in the spring.

I'll take you to your mamma next payday,

I'll take you to your mamma next payday,

I'll take you to the door and I'll kiss you no more,

I'll take you to your mamma next payday.

Photography by Esther Bubley; Edwin Rosskam; Arthur Rothstein; Eudora Welty; Gordon Parks; Alan Lomax; Lewis Hine; Marion Post Wolcott; Russell Lee; William Klein; Ben Shahn; Dorothea Lange; Ernest Hemingway Collection; Margo Newmark Rosenbaum: Chesley Chancey, The Chancey Brothers