“Worried Man Blues” is an American folk song best known from the Carter Family, who made its first documented recording in 1930 for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The Carters, from Maces Spring in southwestern Virginia, drew much of their material from the oral tradition around them, and they took this song from a source now unknown.
Folklorists generally trace the song’s roots to African American singers. In the decades before 1930, Black blues performers had sung lines such as “it takes a worried man to sing a worried song” in various forms, and the melody has been linked to the nineteenth-century spiritual “Do Lord, Remember Me.” The lyric tells of a man who falls asleep by a river and wakes to find himself arrested and facing a long sentence — a narrative many listeners have read against the convict-labor system of the postbellum South.
The song spread widely through the folk revival, recorded by Woody Guthrie, the Kingston Trio, and many others, and it settled comfortably into the bluegrass repertoire as well. Ralph Stanley returned it to its Carter Family source on his 2006 album A Distant Land to Roam, a collection devoted entirely to the Carters’ songs — a fitting home for one of the pieces that family carried into the recorded canon.
