Norman Blake wrote “Ginseng Sullivan” and recorded it first, on his debut album Home in Sulphur Springs (Rounder 0012), released in 1972. Blake cut the album at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville on 30 December 1971, with Tut Taylor on dobro; Blake sang and played guitar, and Tut Taylor and Blake produced it. Blake was born in Chattanooga and grew up in Sulphur Springs, Alabama.
The song opens as a description of its title character, a man whose shack stood near a rail yard, who was seen every day walking down the line with a brown sack across his back and his long hair down behind him. Then Sullivan speaks for himself. It is a long way to the Delta from the north Georgia hills, and a tote sack full of ginseng will not pay his traveling bills. He is too old to ride the rails or thumb the road alone, and he guesses he will never make it back to his “muddy water Mississippi Delta home.” The winters are cold and the damp makes him ill, and the ground freezes too hard to dig roots. His plan is to wait for summer, when he says the companies will pay high for ginseng, and then to pay his bills and bid the mountains goodbye.
“Ginseng Sullivan” is counted among the songs of Blake’s that have become bluegrass and folk standards. The Tony Rice Unit recorded it on Manzanita, released on Rounder in 1979, and Julian Lage and Chris Eldridge, both guitarists, included it on their 2014 duo album Avalon (Modern Lore). Gillian Welch and David Rawlings recorded it for All the Good Times Are Past & Gone (2020), and in 2022 Bob Minner put it on From Sulphur Springs to Rising Fawn: The Songs of Norman Blake.
