Lawd, I don’t know why,
Lawd, I don’t know why,
Lawdy, Lawdy, I don’t know why,
Don’t treat me lak used to.
It won’t be long,
It won’t be long,
Lawdy, Lawd, it won’t be long,
Lawd, it won’t be long.
The old line, “po’ boy ’long way from home,” is still a favorite. In the Negro’s songs and stories of wanderings, home and father and mother are themes of constant appeal, apparently much in contrast to the Negro’s actual home-abiding experiences. The old spirituals sang mostly of the heavenly home of dreams and ideals as opposed to the experience in which “this ol’ world been a hell to me.” In his wanderer song of today the Negro’s wish-dream to be back home appears an equally striking contrast. Nowhere in the workaday songs is childlike and wishful yearning so marked as in these constant songs of homesickness and of the desire for something that is not.
Always accompanying the singer’s dreams of home is his contrasting forlorn condition in the present hour. It would be difficult to find better description of situations than that in which he pictures himself as tired and forsaken on the lonesome road. Parts of this picture may be gathered from the following lines taken here and there from his songs: