What does “hang your head over” mean in “Down in the Valley”?

I started out with the sheet music that we used in the concert, often a source of good info.  In this case, though,  there was only the arranger’s name and that it is a “Kentucky folk tune” with credit specifically given to “Harlan County, Kentucky.” Hmmm. Googling “Down in the Valley Harlan Kentucky” yielded me a fascinating trove of information. The first listing was from the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Apparently the recording has never been digitized, as there’s no audio for the song, but here’s the actual item from the card catalog. Isn’t that just so cool? You can see the hole where the rod went through to hold the card in the drawer; those of you reading this who are too young to remember card catalogs in the library won’t have your nostalgia stirred quite as much as I have. How I used to love flipping through those cards!

Now the “Harlan County” citation on our sheet music makes sense; that’s simply the place where the researcher found someone who knew the song. If you’re up on your history, you’ll know that the “WPA” on the corner of the card refers to the “Works Progress Administration” government agency set up during the Great Depression to create jobs for the unemployed. So I figured that the “John A. Lomax” cited on the card was simply an out-of-work college professor or some such, but no! Lomax was indeed a college professor, among many other accomplishments, but he was no small-time card-typing flunky. (That position was probably held by some nameless woman, alas.) He was a famed folklorist and musicologist who was in charge of the Library of Congress Archive of American Song for a decade and who traveled extensively with his son throughout the South to document folk music, concentrating especially on African-American music gleaned from prison inmates who had no access to the radio or recordings of popular music and therefore were still singing older music. Here’s a great description from Wikipedia:

In July 1933, they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315–pound uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” whom they considered one of their most significant finds. During the next year and a half, father and son continued to make disc recordings of musicians throughout the South. (I’d encourage you to read the entire article about Lomax here.)

I decided to try for further information on “Blind James Howard” and found this passage from Lomax’s book Adventures of a Ballad Hunter:

At last over in Kentucky we found him — the blind bard, with a good voice, for whom we had been looking since we left Texas. Near Harlan, Kentucky, where feuds are still active, he lived in a rocky gorge in a typical mountain home, and there he sang for us until our records were filled. Alan put the microphone and the singer out under a shade tree in the yard where he sat leaning forward in a rocking chair, playing softly on his fiddle as he sang ballads — blood-stirring ballads of love and life in the mountains.

His name was James Howard. He was kindly, keenly intelligent, without formal education. His handsome face would light with pleasure as Alan played back for him the recorded songs, executed almost as perfectly as if sung in a soundproof room under ideal conditions. Lying around in the grass, as attentive and shy and observant as little animals, were a lot of mountain children, while the smiling wife peered from the doorway. The experience was unforgettable.
(from Adventures of a Ballad Hunter by John A, Lomax, MacMillan, 1947, posted on the website Old Time Party. Follow the link to get a page with a recording of Howard singing, although he’s not performing our song since, as mentioned above, not all LOC audio materials have been digitized.)

On to the song itself. This is called a “courting song,” which means (big news flash here) it’s a type of love song, sung either to or about the object of the singer’s courtship. The arrangement my choir sang included only three verses of many, so I’ll concentrate on those.

Back to the “hang your head over” line. (Remember that? I talked about it a long time ago.) An alternate reading of the line says, “Late in the evening/Hear the train blow.” Somehow to me that alternate reading helps set the scene better. So you could picture a couple sitting up on the ridge or cliff at twilight overlooking the valley where they live. The train whistle (or the wind blowing) has a lonesome sound. The guy turns to the girl and says in his Kentucky twang, “Listen! Can you hear that? Hang your head over.” (So I’m taking “hang” to mean “lean.”) There they are, warm and secure and in love, with that far-off sound in their ears that perhaps reminds them how set apart they are in their own little world.

Fine, you say, but what about the lines that describe building a castle forty feet high to watch “her,” whoever that may be, as she goes by, and the one that says “love whom you please” but, in the meantime, “throw your arms round me”? All I can say is, this song has a ton of verses and they don’t all fit together neatly. Remember, it evolved from oral tradition. So the “castle” verse seems to be about the loved one, not to her, and the “throw your arms round me” verse a statement of the rather cynical “if you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with” philosophy. So you could say that each verse has a different view of love and that’s why the arranger chose those three. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it!

Here’s a totally charming rendition of this song with an old-time string band, a lead singer with a great voice, and at least half a ton of verses:

Since this post is pretty long, I’ll leave it up to you as to whether or not you’d like to read the obituary for the arranger of the version we sang, George Mead. Here it is..

And here’s at least a sampling of possible verses: