“Ginseng Sullivan” is an original song by the guitarist and singer Norman Blake, a quiet master of traditional-style American music whose own compositions sit easily beside far older material. Blake first recorded the song in 1972, on his album “Home in Sulphur Springs.”
The song is a small, finely drawn character study. Its title figure is a man scraping by in the hill country of north Georgia, digging wild ginseng root to sell, hoping to save enough to make his way back to his “muddy-water Mississippi Delta home.” The cold, the damp, and the meager pay keep undercutting him, and the song leaves open the quiet likelihood that he will never get back at all.
Written in a plain, weathered idiom that feels handed down rather than composed, “Ginseng Sullivan” has been embraced as a modern standard of the acoustic repertoire. It has been recorded by the Tony Rice Unit and by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, among others, and remains one of Blake’s most widely loved songs.
