Way Down Yonder in the White Man’s Field
From the Album Here I Stand: Elder’s Wisdom; Children’s Song (Smithsonian Folkways)
How many of you made history yesterday? You made history yesterday?
Sure enough? Now wait a minute.
Somebody’s holding a hand up saying they did,
and somebody’s shaking their head
and saying they didn’t make no history yesterday.
Everybody in here made history yesterday.
Because yesterday pass and it is gone,
and whatever happened is in the past, that’s history.
But, when you come to school, we generally think about history
as what we see in a book.
But you see, you can’t put all history in a book.
So, you got a lot of history that is not in the book that is valuable.
And sometimes it is more valuable than the history that is in the book.
Now, didn’t nobody write about what you did yesterday,
so that is not written history.
It’s what we call oral history.
– Ezra Cunningham
The truck would come at 2 a.m.
To take us back to the field again
Fifty cents a hundred is what we got paid
Sometimes we picked two-hundred and that’s all we made
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Never made enough to pay my bills
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Full of caterpillars on the leaves
Jumping and popping I could not believe
Just like ants on meat skin
Had to keep right on working to get home again
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Never made enough to pay my bills
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Look at the cotton and not the worms
Never got paid for what I earned
The cotton was heavy on my back
But the scale was light when he dropped the sack
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Never made enough to pay my bills
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Three at the foot and three at the head
A pallet on the floor for my bed
All we had to eat was a guinea knot
A glass of water was all we got
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Never made enough to pay my bills
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
October, November picked velvet beans
Didn’t make enough to buy kerosene
Had to cut splinters to get some light
To do homework into the night
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Never made enough to pay my bills
Way down yonder in the white man’s field
Words & music by Larry Long
Copyright Larry Long 1996 | BMI
*Lyrics collectively written with youth from Beatrice rural Alabama through the Elders’ Wisdom, Children’s Song program in partnership with PACERS Small Schools Cooperative and Community Celebration of Place. Inspired by Mrs. Irene Marshal.
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Here I Stand: Elders’ Wisdom, Children’s Song is exclusively available on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Larry’s music is available on Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, Bandcamp and select e-tailers