Merry Christmas from New York City especially to farmers in Australia and California

The farmer is the one who feeds them all. 

Remembering The Old Songs:

THE FARMER IS THE MAN

by Bob Waltz

(Originally published: Inside Bluegrass, August 2006)

I recently read a book on history which described what makes a "civilization." Literature, art, things like that.

It's all wrong. What makes a civilization is disposable energy. Art and such are what make a civilization interesting, but without energy, you won't get the cultural stuff.

Energy comes in all sorts of forms--electrical energy (such as comes out of your wall socket), mechanical energy (a moving car has lots of that). Plus food energy. It was food energy--as in farming--that caused the first civilizations to arise. Then, and only then, were there enough spare calories (a unit of energy, if you remember your Earth Science classes) to support the people needed to create culture. Hunter-gatherers could have songs and oral tradition, but no more. Real culture--the kind with books, for instance--requires farming.

Earlier this year, Lyle looked at the suppliers of one sort of energy: The coal miners. Who have traditionally been poor. So, too, with farmers. There were a lot of songs protesting farm conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (things like Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat), but this is the only one I learned as a child. (Be it noted that I did not grow up on a farm. I must have learned it from a record, but I don't know what record.)

John Greenway argued, in American Folksongs of Protest, that this song came from the period after the Civil War. We should note that Greenway has a lot of well-researched but very strange ideas. (You've probably run across professors like that.) Most people think it comes from the populist movements of the 1890s.

Still, it is an unquestionable part of the old time tradition: Fiddlin' John Carson himself recorded it for OKeh in 1923 (and, for the fiscal conservatives out there, parodied it as Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Us Allin 1935).

In these days of factory farms, it's not all that relevant anyv more; most food doesn't come from a small farmer. But maybe that's the point.

[CLICK HERE FOR SHEET MUSIC (pdf file)] 

Complete Lyrics:
When the farmer comes to town
With his wagon broken down,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you'll only look and see,
I am sure you will agree,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
The farmer is the man (x2)
Lives on credit till the fall,
Then they take him by the hand,
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman's the man who gets it all.

When the lawyer hangs around
While the butcher cuts a pound,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
And the preacher and the cook
Go a-strolling down the brook,
The farmer is the man who feeds them alt.
The farmer is the man (x2)
Lives on credit till the fall.
With the interest rate so high,
It's a wonder he don't die;
The banker is the man who gets it all.

When the banker says he's broke,
And the merchant's up in smoke,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest.
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
The farmer is the man (x2)
Lives on credit till the fall,
His clothes are wearing thin,
His condition is a sin;
He's forgot that he's the man who feeds them all.

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