“Dink’s Song,” also known as “Fare Thee Well,” was preserved by the folklorist John Lomax, who heard it in 1909 from an African American woman named Dink as she washed clothes in a camp of levee workers on the Brazos River, near Houston, Texas. Lomax published the words in 1917 and the music, with his son Alan, in 1934.
The song is a woman’s lament, deserted by the lover she needed most, its refrain — “fare thee well” — carrying a weary, hard-won grief. Almost nothing is known of Dink herself, but the fragment she sang became one of the most haunting pieces in the American folk songbag.
Folk-revival singers from Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan took it up, and it has reached well beyond the revival since. The string band Furnace Mountain recorded it on their 2007 album Fly the River, one of many groups to keep the old song alive.
