Labour & Pop Culture: Field Behind the Plow

This week’s installment is Labour & Pop Culture is “Field Behind the Plow” by Stan Rogers. Rogers wrote this song while touring the prairies and seeing grain farmers out in the middle of the night (presumably the preserve to folk singers travelling between towns) plowing their fields.

An interesting trend I’m seeing in folk songs is that they often talk about work in greater granularity and specificity than songs about work in other genres (e.g., Work Bitch or Working for the Weekend). For example:

Buy the kids a winter coat,
take the wife back east for Christmas if you can

All summer she hangs on
when you’re so tied to the land

I assume the highly personal nature of the lyrics is a part of the ballad tradition of folk music. This will be an interesting hypothesis to examine when I get around to a lyrical analysis.

I also see this recurring theme about working to meet family needs. For example, Billy Joel talks about this in the Downeaster Alexa (“I got people back on land who count on me”) and as does Don Henley in A Month of Sunday (“But I always put the clothes on our backs/But I always get the shoes on our feet”). Clearly financial pressure to feed the family is a recurring (and perhaps important) theme across a number of songs

It was hard to find a video for this song so you have an excerpt from a documentary about Rogers.



Watch the field behind the plow turn to straight dark rows
Feel the trickle in your clothes, blow the dusk cake from your nose
And hear the tractor’s steady roar, O you can’t stop now
There’s a quarter section more or less to go

And it figures that the rain takes it’s own sweet time
You can watch it come for miles, but you guess you’ve got a while
Ease the throttle out a hair, every rod’s a gain
There’s victory in every quarter mile

Poor old Kuzyk down the road

The heartache, hail and hoppers got him down

He gave it up and went to town

And Emmett Pierce, the other day
took a heart attack and died at 42

You could see it comin’ on,
‘cuz he worked as hard as you

Well in an hour, maybe more, you’ll be wet clear through
The air is cooler now, pull your hat brim further down
And watch the field behind the plow turn to straight dark rows
Put another season’s promise in the ground

And if the harvest’s any good,
the money might just cover all the loans

You’ve mortgaged all you own

Buy the kids a winter coat,
take the wife back east for Christmas if you can

All summer she hangs on
when you’re so tied to the land

For the good times come and go, but at least there’s rain
So this won’t be barren ground when September comes around
And watch the field behind the plow turn to straight dark rows
Put another season’s promise in the ground
Watch the field behind the plow, turn to straight rows
But another season’s promise in the ground

-- Bob Barnetson