“Mole in the Ground” — more fully “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” — is a traditional Appalachian song, one of the most striking and enigmatic pieces in the old-time repertoire. It has no known author; the banjoist and song collector Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who first recorded it in the 1920s, said he had learned it from a North Carolina neighbor around the turn of the century.
The song is a string of restless, surreal wishes — to be a mole burrowing in the ground, to be a lizard, to see a sweetheart change her ways — held together more by mood than by story. That dreamlike strangeness has fascinated listeners and scholars alike, especially after the song appeared on Harry Smith’s hugely influential “Anthology of American Folk Music” in 1952.
The song became a touchstone of the old-time and folk revival, and it remains a favorite of clawhammer banjo players.
