Today is the deadline for WXPN’s listener poll of the best songs from movies or television. Each voter gets to list 10 songs, and like El Somnambulo, I try to vote for tracks I think will be overlooked by others. I’m still undecided on my No. 10 – scoring awards points in descending order so it doesn’t much matter – but I’ve settled on my No. 1.
“Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)” forms the emotional core of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the under-appreciated Coen Brothers 2013 film. The movie centers on a fictional singer in Greenwich Village during the Great Folk Music Scare of the early ’60s. Though the filmmakers bought the rights to folksinger Dave Van Ronk’s autobiography, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” they used only bits and pieces of his story to create their perpetually self-defeating protagonist.
Oscar Isaac, who sang and played guitar live in the film, sings the song three times. The first is a duet with Marcus Mumford, who provides the voice of Davis’ dead partner, Mike Timlin, as Davis listens to the track from their album. The second is at a dinner party hosted by a couple who lets Davis crash on their sofa; when the woman tries to harmonize by singing Mike’s part, Davis explodes in anger – it’s clear he’s haunted by Timlin’s suicide.
The final version comes in the film’s penultimate scene, as Davis performs it solo at the Gaslight Cafe. Isaac’s wrenching performance embodies his character’s tragic contradiction – he can’t connect emotionally with anyone except when he’s on stage. I can think of no other song so crucial to the film it appears in.
Van Ronk was among the dozens of folk singers who recorded the tune under a variety of titles – “If I Had Wings,” “Nora’s Dove,” “Dink’s Blues,” and most often “Dink’s Song,” after the woman who sang it for ethnomusicologist John Lomax in 1909. Years later Lomax recalled their encounter.
“I found Dink scrubbing her man’s clothes in the shade of their tent across the Brazos River from the A&M College in Texas. Professor James C. Nagle of the College faculty was the supervising engineer of a levee-building company and he had invited me to come along and bring my Edison recording machine.
‘Dink knows all the songs,’ said her companion. But I did not find her helpful until I walked a mile to a farm commissary and bought her a pint of gin. As she drank the gin, the sounds from her scrubbing board increased in intensity and in volume. She worked as she talked. … ‘My man drives a four-wheel scraper down there where you see the dust risin’. I keeps his tent, cooks his vittles and washes his clothes. Some day I’ze goin’ to wrap up his wet breeches and shirts, roll ’em up in a knot, put ’em in the middle of the bed, and tuck down the covers right nice. Then I’m going on up the river where I belong.’ She sipped her gin and sang and drank until the bottle was empty.
Lomax’s wax cylinder broke soon after he had transcribed the song, so Dink’s voice is long lost. Lomax didn’t publish the music until 1934, and its first recording came in 1942 by Libby Holman, a socialite and Broadway actress with a Delaware connection – she had a long romantic relationship with DuPont heiress Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter of Montchanin.
The folk music revival of the ’50s saw a spate of recordings by the likes of Pete Seeger, Burl Ives and Harry Belafonte, using a variety of verses and time signatures. Isaac’s solo performance is clearly patterned on Van Ronk’s, the only one I could find in 3/4 time. Van Ronk usually sang in a gruff baritone, so “Fare Thee Well” is an anomaly in his catalog.
