Five Hundred Miles
This song seems to me such an essentially American song, simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes — of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride — with other great American songs (like “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” for instance, or Woody Guthrie’s “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad”). It’s supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.
Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn’t take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:
Here is Joan Baez’s winningly ingenuous version.
And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can’t be denied.
Happy Fourth of July to all of our American readers.
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This really is one of those songs of which it can be said that, whatever your taste in music, there’s a version right for you. I’m partial to that of the The Hooters, which hits the nostalgia button, and of that of the The Journeymen.
Love love love love love.
This is one of the things I love about music. Whoever sings it makes it her own. Nice.
Nearly every singer-for-the-folk performs this beautiful song, as well they might! Thank you, Pentimento, for finding and sharing these several moving versions.
I’m a fan of the sparsest arrangements and the most stripped-down versions, though I do love the soaring, quasi-operatic vocals of The Seekers’ version. It’s strange watching videos of Joan Baez, because her style, her musicality, and her charming stage presence are so completely foreign to the way popular music is presented today.
Jesse Colin Young did a version pre-Youngbloods that was poignant and beautiful. Forget the name of the group he sang with then, but when I get home tonight I’ll see if I can dig it up in my CD collection.
No one sings of loneliness like Americans can.
I completely agree, Matt.
This song brings back a lot of memories. One of them is that we used to sing it for a hymn; our home parish had some green plastic folders containing badly mimeographed pirated music in the pews. Of course that was a long time ago; we have since become more enlightened about things such as copyright laws and what is liturgically appropriate. But I still like Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Wow. Liturgically aberrant and legally shady, but somehow pretty cool.
Thanks for this. I preferred Hedy West’s twangy banjo “Hunnerd Mals” version after all.