Lyrics to In The Pines :Black girl, black Girl, dont lie to meTell me where did you sleep last night?In the pines, In the pines, Where the sun never shineI shivered the whole night through.

Black girl, black girl, where will you goIm going where the cold wind blowsIn the pines, In the pines, Where the sun never shineI will shiver the whole night through.

Black girl, black Girl, dont lie to meTell me where did you sleep last night?In the pines, In the pines, Where the sun never shineI shivered the whole night through.

My Husband was a Railroad manKilled a mile and a half from hereHis head, was found, In a drivers wheelAnd his body hasn't never been found.

Black girl, black girl, where will you goIm going where the cold wind blowsYou called me weak, and you called me the mostYou called rita, bring me back home.

Goodnight IreneLast Saturday night, I got married,me and my wife settled downNow me and my wife are parted,I'm gonna take another stroll downtown

Sometimes I live in the country,sometimes I live in townSometimes I take a great notion,to jump into the river and drown

I love Irene, God knows I do,I'll love her till the seas run dryBut if Irene should turn me down,I'd take the morphine and die

Stop rambling, stop your gambling,stop staying out late at nightGo home to your wife and your family,stay there by your fireside bright

Where Did You Sleep Last Night lyricsMy girl, my girl, don't lie to meTell me where did you sleep last nightIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night throughMy girl, my girl, where will you goI'm going where the cold wind blowsIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night throughHer husband, was a hard working manJust about a mile from hereHis head was found in a driving wheelBut his body never was foundMy girl, my girl, don't lie to meTell me where did you sleep last nightIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night throughMy girl, my girl, where will you goI'm going where the cold wind blowsIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night throughMy girl, my girl, don't lie to meTell me where did you sleep last nightIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night throughMy girl, my girl, where will you goI'm going where the cold wind blowsIn the pines, in the pinesWhere the sun don't ever shineI would shiver the whole night through

"In the Pines", also known as "Black Girl" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", is a traditional American folk song which dates back to at least the 1870s, and is believed to be Southern Appalachian in origin. The identity of the song's author is unknown, but it has been recorded by dozens of artists in numerous genres. A 1993 acoustic version by Nirvana introduced the song to many people at the end of the twentieth century. Kurt Cobain attributed authorship to Lead Belly, who had recorded the song several times, beginning in 1944, but the version performed by Lead Belly and covered by Nirvana does not differ substantially from other variants of the song.

Early historyLike numerous other folk songs, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody. The lines are:

Black girl, black girl, don't lie to meWhere did you stay last night?I stayed in the pines where the sun never shinesAnd shivered when the cold wind blows

In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song. This variant include a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". "The Longest Train" stanzas probably began as a separate song that later merged into "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may date it to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions that mention that someone's "head was found in the driver's wheel" make clear that the train caused the decapitation, some later versions would drop the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. Music historian Norm Cohen, in his 1981 book "Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong," states the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a stanza about "the longest train" and a stanza about a decapitation, though not all elements are present in all versions.[1]

Starting the year following the 1925 recording, commercial recordings of the song were done by various folk and bluegrass bands. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines or who is decapitated has been described as a man, a woman, an adolescent, a wife, a husband or a parent, while the pines have represented sexuality, death or loneliness. The train has been described killing a loved one, as taking one's beloved away or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.[1]

In variants in which the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman, and never a man. The Kossoy Sisters folk version asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to one version's "Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?" is "from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines."[1] The theme of a woman who has been caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, sang in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain Georgia, told of the rape of a young Georgia girl, who fled to the pines in shame. Her rapist, a male soldier, was later beheaded by the train. Mrs. Ellison had stated that it was her belief that the song was from the time shortly after the U.S. Civil War.

Notable versions• Peg Leg Howell recorded a traditional blues version as "Rolling Mill Blues" in 1929 for

Columbia Records; also performed with Eddie Anthony on fiddle and recorded as "The Rolling Mill Blues" in the late 1940s.

• Bill Monroe 's 1941 and 1952 recordings with his Bluegrass Boys were highly influential on later bluegrass and country versions. Fiddles and yodeling are used to evoke the cold wind blowing through the pines, and the lyrics suggest a quality of timelessness about the train: "I asked my captain for the time of day/He said he throwed his watch away". His rendition is slower than the versions performed by Lead belly and others.

• Lead Belly recorded over half-a-dozen versions between 1944 and 1948, most often under the title, "Black Girl" or "Black Gal". His first rendition, for Musicraft Records in New York City in February 1944, is arguably his most familiar.

• Nathan Abshire , a Louisiana Cajun accordion player, recorded a distinct variation of the song, sung in Cajun French, under the name "Pine Grove Blues." His melody is a hard-driving blues, but the lyrics, when translated to English, are the familiar, "Hey, black girl, where did you sleep last night?" It became his theme song and he recorded it at least three times from the 1940s onward.

• Pete Seeger 's version of "Black Girl" appears on the 2002 Smithsonian Folkways re-release of recordings from the 1950s and the 1960s entitled American Favorite Ballads, Vol. 1.

• The Louvin Brothers' version appears on the 1956 album, Tragic Songs of Life. • The Kossoy Sisters recorded "In the Pines" in their 1959 session with Erik Darling. • Bob Dylan performed the song on November 4, 1961 at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York

City. He performed it again on January 12, 1990 at the Toad's Place in New Haven, Connecticut. Neither of these recordings has been officially released.

• The New Christy Minstrels , under the direction of Randy Sparks, recorded a version for their 1961 debut album on the Columbia label.

• Joan Baez 's version appears on Very Early Joan (performances between 1961 and 1963). • Doc Watson often performed the song, and a live recording exists, dating from the 1960s. He

sang it faster than most other versions, accompanied only by his banjo. • Roscoe Holcomb recorded a version, available on The High Lonesome Sound. • Jackson C. Frank 's version appears on the second disc of Blues Run the Game. • Clifford Jordan 's 1965 jazz arrangement with singer Sandra Douglass. • The Four Pennies recorded and released "Black Girl" in October 1964, which reached No. 20 in

the British charts. • The Pleazers recorded "Poor Girl" in 1965. It was originally recorded as "Black Girl," but

changed due to it being viewed as racist. • Grateful Dead recorded the song on July 17, 1966. It appears as "In The Pines" on their 2001

box set, The Golden Road. • John Phillips ' version of "Black Girl" appears as a bonus track on the remastered CD of John

Phillips (John, the Wolf King of L.A.) recorded in 1969. • Long John Baldry 's "Black Girl," a duet with Maggie Bell, appears on It Ain't Easy. • Dave Van Ronk 's version appears on The Folkway Years 1959 - 1961. • Link Wray recorded two versions titled "Georgia Pines" and "In the Pines" on his 1973 folk-

rock release Beans and Fatback. • The Osborne Brothers recorded a version for the album Up This Hill And Down (Decca

DL-74767) in June 1966. • Gene Clark recorded the song for his 1977 album Two Sides to Every Story. • Charlie Feathers recorded a version in the 1980s in Memphis. • Mark Lanegan 's version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was recorded in August 1989,

and appears on his 1990 debut solo album, The Winding Sheet. Promo single from Nirvana's 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York

• Nirvana occasionally performed "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" during the early 1990s. Singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain was introduced to the song by Lanegan, and played guitar on the latter's version. Like Lanegan, Cobain usually screamed the song's final verse. Cobain earned critical and commercial acclaim for his acoustic performance of the song during Nirvana's MTV Unplugged appearance in 1993. This version was posthumously released on the band's MTV Unplugged in New York album the following year. A solo Cobain home demo of the song, recorded in 1990, appears on the band's 2004 box set, With the Lights Out. It does not feature the final screamed verse of later versions.

• Dolly Parton 's live version was recorded in 1994. It appears on her album, Heartsongs: Live From Home. "It's easy to play, easy to sing, great harmonies and very emotional," said Parton of the song, who learned it from elder members of her family. "The perfect song for simple people."[1]

• Odetta , the American folk/blues singer, recorded the song for her 2001 tribute album to Lead Belly, Looking For A Home - Thanks to Leadbelly.

• R. Crumb performed "In the Pines" in Hamburg, Germany in 2003. The only known release of this live performance is on R. Crumb's Music Sampler that is included with the R. Crumb Handbook.

• Ralph Stanley & Jimmy Martin's version appears on their album, First Time Together, released in 2005.

• Smog 's version appears on his 2005 album A River Ain't Too Much to Love. • Josh White 's recording of "Black Girl" on New York to London (2002).

In films• The song can be heard in the background of the Nicholas Ray film The True Story of Jesse

James. • A few lines of the song are sung by Sissy Spacek, playing Loretta Lynn, in the 1980 film, Coal

Miner's Daughter. • Lead Belly's version of the song appears in the 1997 horror film, I Know What You Did Last

Summer.

In plays• The song appears in the 1958 play A Taste of Honey, by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney.

It is sung by the character Josephine, who replaces the lyric "black girl" with "black boy." The "black boy" in the play is her boyfriend Jimmy, a black sailor who impregnated her.

• The song also appears in the 2009 play Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Anna Friel as Holly Golightly. Sung accoustically by Holly at the front of the stage with just a guitar.

In literature• The song is mentioned in Charles Frazier's novel Thirteen Moons. While writing of the progress

of the railroad through North Carolina in the years following Reconstruction, the lead character, Will Cooper, reminisces of a song, "about pines and the head caught in the driving wheel and the body on the line, the narrator pleading to know where his woman slept last night."

In the Pines

Alice Notley

Penguin ($18)

by Christopher Luna

Alice Notley’s latest collection, In the Pines, begins and ends with questions. Like her previous work, it challenges preconceived notions about poetry; Notley not only deconstructs language to push against patriarchal presumptions, but her writing deliberately blurs the line between poetry and prose, forcing one to concentrate on the writing rather than one’s ideas about the writing.

The eponymous prose poem concerns many subjects, including the fragility of mental stability and the differences between men and women. At times the narrator appears to be a character named “no one” who wonders whether her mentally ill siblings share “defective” genes. The sister in the story is in the hospital, and we learn about her attitudes toward “the needle,” a word with an obvious double meaning:

You find the needle repellent. He found it dramatically ambivalent. For me it had no qualities.

For me, I myself have hardly any characteristics.

I sometimes have them in my dreams. The story is false. Why is the story generated? For beauty’s sake? For the sake of making a thing of besides fire and light?

Like the best art, Notley’s words are specific enough to create clear imagery, yet opaque enough to encourage various subjective interpretations.

Notley’s poetry employs many popular song lyrics, inviting one to speculate about her own relationship to the songs that recur. Here, the titular reference to Leadbelly could just as easily apply to Nirvana’s chilling cover of the song for their “Unplugged” television special, a performance which took on morbid associations following Kurt Cobain’s death. One of the characters is described as “lying there leaking songs.” The prose poem is a delicious kind of puzzle, and as we are warned, “If you don’t know the song, you don’t know anything.”

Songs are presented as a part of the genetic code, and the key to understanding both one’s own mind and the poem. The song will help one “find your soul,” but “do you want it?” In the pines, “everyone’s composed of their losses, they are purely negative. . .” The sister sings:

Under my dressunder my dressis a layer of shit

Under that layer of shitam Iam I.

She is so far gone that “There is a diamond in my wound and I can’t see it. In my defect. In my defect.”

The fifth section of the poem asks questions about the nature of love, identity, and property. The sister’s madness is compared to Leadbelly’s, and the pines become a metaphor for the increasing instability of the narrator; she asks “how far gone / into my defect / am I?” Meanwhile, Leadbelly’s iconic “Irene” becomes the “goddess of compassion,” but her power is questioned. Somewhere along the way, the narrator finds herself “losing the because.”

Notley constructs multiple layers of conversation, sometimes talking to herself, or perhaps to other writers who aspire to innovation: “don’t show your change.” Is she encouraging us to switch narrative voices without warning? Notley may be the sister, or the narrator, or both. In any case, a linear or

rational approach to understanding the events in the story may not help.

In the Pines is a psychologically and linguistically complex invocation that tears away the veil of separation between men and women, body and mind, and other dichotomies. At one point, we are told, “You have left the world of the mind-body problem and entered the world of symbols.” These include the tarot. The narrator expresses a fear of love; someone, perhaps a doctor, “is trying to read me.”

The poem also addresses the danger inherent in being idolized and made to symbolize womanhood: “You can be cut up by any man’s ideas.” The goddess laments that she will die without having “seen the fall of male power.” As the poem draws to a close, we are provided with some clues as to the identity of the narrator:

I was born to be your poet. I am the woman, your poet. All that I am.

And I know one thing. No one. Is the poet. I am.

She just did what she had to do.

Who else can do this? No one. Any no one who cares to, and the eyes above, where I have been, approve.

But can she be trusted? The mysterious narrator tells us, “I prefer the live versions. The performance of the search for the soul.” The poem ultimately ends in the “boughs where the shamans come to life,” a place the narrator prefers because “the tree of the shamans” is “the tree of life.”

The second section of the book, “Black Trailor,” is about ghosts, lost love, and the suffering of humanity. The title poem is “a Noir Fiction” murder mystery told from the point of view of the corpse. “Conspiracy” is a great piece about the stories we tell each other about our neighbors, trying to guess who might be a serial killer. As elsewhere, the use of the first person makes it tempting to read certain lines (“I wanted to be famous”) as autobiographical, though this would be a mistake. Notley is also a master of the unexpected turn-of-phrase, as in “Locust:” “Maybe I was too tried.”

The final section, “Hemostatic,” contains the most abrasive material in the book; here the dead converse with and interrogate their live counterparts. In “You Have No Idea,” the poet argues with the dead, who ask her questions she can’t answer. The final lines of the final poem leave the reader with additional questions to ponder:

Change fleeing

over the washed-out placesI fell in love with, singing.

Could I? Does one?

and if you say yes, are you someone?

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008