woody sez

Woody Says: If you never been to jail, without a single friend to your name, and stood around there like a lost dog in a hard rain, why then you won't get the full meaning out of any jailhouse song. I know, I've been where I could hear all them things. If all the jails I been in was all put together, it would make a hard rock hotel as big as the Capitol building. And this is the best jailhouse song I ever heard sung (Hard Times). The Birmingham Jail don't say enough, The Prisoners Song don't say much either. Moonlight and Skies brags too much on the deputies. Of course, lots of officers are honest and straight, but there's a hell of a lot of them that are ten times worse crooks and thieves than fellers they beat up and throw in jail. And them's the kind of jailers this song tells about. Its been sung in every buggy, lousy jail from New Jersey to Portland Oregon from the days of the Revolution to the present."

Woody remembers: .... When I got out of jail, I made a run for a bottle of liquor and a pretty woman. I met her in a saloon, I had a couple of shots under my belt and was rearin' to step. She was one-eyed, but that didn't matter none. I had two eyes and she looked mighty good to me through both of 'em. I felt like a man coming up out of the grave when I stepped out of that jail. I had seventy one dollars saved up and would have blowed seventy one hundred if I'd of had it, just for a crack at that one eyed girl. Her one eye was as pretty as a picture. So I slipped by guitar into position and i played her my old Okie love song. You might think it was mighty funny kind of serenade. You might think it was too hard boiled and sad to soften up a woman's heart. But that woman was pretty hard boiled and pretty sad herself. She had had her heart broke as many times as my old uncle's wheat field, and it was broke every spring in planting time. She didn't want no mushy, sissyfied, jukebox lullaby, she wanted a song as real as the oak bar she was leaning against. So I rattled out my old song about how hard it is to love someone who never did love you, and by the end of the first chorus she was smiling through that one eye of hers. And there was a lot of choruses to that song. " (from Alan Lomax's book, Folks Songs of North America)