Another great song I got re-introduced to during my Old Time/folk/mountain music jam the other night… This song seems to be titled variously as “When I Lay My Burden Down” or “Since I’ve laid my burden down.” Sometimes “burden” is also pluralized as “burdens.”
One thing that’s really interesting with folk music is that there isn’t necessarily such a thing as an “official” version. You usually just end up with the best known version being the most prominent. In this case, there seem to be two competing best known versions, each with slightly different lyrics.
This is certainly the coolest video available of this song, and is the Furry Lewis version:
You’ll notice that he isn’t playing the guitar so much as he is doing a duet with it as an equal, the guitar is almost treated as an entity unto itself and he even talks to it - and it talks back.
This is the other version of it I’m seeing pop up (the discrepancy actually appeared the other night when we were playing it live, because some people knew each version), which is attributed to Mississippi John Hurt:
The video for that is fucking retarded, but it’s what was available. And here are alternate takes on the lyrics:
- When I lay my burden down (link includes an audio recording in key of F of this song)
- Glory Glory Hallelujah (an alternate title for it)
There’s also a version with chords I keep finding but pretty different lyrics attributed to the Byrds that I keep seeing come up, but it seems like it’s either a different arrangement or a totally different song. Don’t know as I don’t have the Byrds recording available for it. If anybody spots a better tabs/chords for this song (non-Byrds version), please drop a link below - or if you have the Byrds version handy, I’d like to hear that.
Also found a rogue mp3 floating around attributed to Mississippi John Hurt which is a nice clean version of this song to study and enjoy. You should be able to download it fine here.
I kind of like having to piece together how these songs are supposed to go, and it’s cool to see the process in person of how groups of people negotiate how a song will go, when everyone involved knows a slightly different version, is playing different instruments and is at different skill levels. Mostly, I just try to follow along and wing it and learn from the people around me.
In real life, it usually means that I sit there and watch carefully as someone who knows the song better than me and is a better guitar player plays through it and try to move my fingers more or less approximately at the same rate as them and try not to mess it up. This is a decent video for that:
This version is kind of cool too, an Asian dude playing it with a slide. I like how scratchy the audio and video are and enjoy the dude’s approach in general (much better than this one). He seems like he’s really feelin it:
I like this song a lot as, to me, it relates directly to what I was writing about months ago in terms of giving up suffering.
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