Little Satchel

The lyric opens as a courtship. A young man tells his sweetheart to ask her father whether she may be his bride, promises to wait if the answer is no, and imagines the two of them settling down once she is free, perhaps in California or Louisiana. Then the song turns: the singer wishes he were an angel who could fly over prison walls back to her, admits he has no wings, and goes back broken-hearted to weep and moan.

The New Lost City Ramblers learned it from Cockerham’s recording and gave it a new setting for Tracy Schwarz’s vocal, with clawhammer and finger-picked banjo in the double-banjo manner of Happy Smith and Larry Richardson. It appears on their Folkways album On the Great Divide (1975) and on Out Standing in Their Field, Vol. 2 (Smithsonian Folkways, 1993). Dirk Powell included it on If I Go Ten Thousand Miles (Rounder, 1996), Sarah Jarosz closed her album World on the Ground (Rounder, 2020) with it, listed there as a traditional song, and Nora Brown recorded it for Long Time to Be Gone (Jalopy, 2022).