I wonder if any of our friends here at Word & Song have a cousin Ernie? My husband and I grew up with literally dozens of cousins, with not an Ernie in the bunch. But back in the 1950’s everyone had a cousin Ernie: one Ernest Jennings Ford, otherwise known as “Tennessee Ernie.” Ernie Ford was a true crossover entertainer, known for his work in radio, television, and music — country, gospel, and popular. As it turns out, there was a lot more to Cousin Ernie than his corn-pone radio and television persona would lead us to think. After high school, Ford attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music where he studied classical voice, before turning his considerable vocal talent and personality to show business. He was a patriot who served as an officer in the US Army Air Corps during WW II as a bombardier deployed in Japan. Although he never worked in the mines, Ernie grew up in a coal-mining part of Tennessee and certainly knew stories of many hard-working miners. It was no wonder then that he was able to draw on all of his life experiences and training to produce what became his signature song, “Sixteen Tons.” That song, written and first recorded by country singer-songwriter, Merle Travis, became major hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford in the water-mark year of 1955. If you’ve never heard Cousin Ernie sing, get ready for a treat. If you have, settle in to revisit an iconic American song in the tradition of working-man folk songs such as “John Henry.”
What a great song, thank you! For anyone interested in the American songbook, Mark Steyn’s writings are invaluable. Here he is on Sixteen Tons:
https://www.steynonline.com/4434/sixteen-tons
Debra wrote, "I wonder if any of our friends here at Word & Song have a cousin Ernie?"
No cousins that I know of, but I did have one relative by that name. A father, in fact. And as an Iowa farmer for thirty years getting up at 3am, trudging out to the barn through bitter cold and snow in the winter to milk a barn full of cows, makes me think my father could have sung something like "Sixteen Cows." :-)
Anyway, one of my favorite parts of the song in each chorus is how he refuses, no matter how long he holds that last note, to actually finish that last word of the phrase, "company sto.....," preserving the rhyme at all costs to the bitter end. And he only emphasizes that determination all the more by still refusing on that e'en-longer-drug-out last line at the end of the song. LOVE IT!
"Rhyme rules!", he seems to say with a glaring eye, "An' if ya wanna hassle o'r it, step up an' try yo' han wit' me, huh?"
This is exactly the sort of song that Angelee grew up with (her father sang them to her from her youngest days), and she loved them and sang them to our boys from the day they were born, and had (I still have, of course) several books of old folk songs and sea shanties and such.
Even typing this out, I can hear, in my head, her singing, in her unexepectedly low (for a daintily-framed female) voice, "...A-sailing down along the coast of High Barbary..." or "Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare. All along, down along, out along lea. For I want for to go to Widecombe Fair." or "Lowlands, lowlands away me John..."
She SO would have loved seeing this post and video, almost as much as I do seeing it and listening to it now... Thanks for posting it. Sigh. I need to put on a playlist of old folk song now, I think...