Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)

Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)   Fare Thee Well – or “Dink’s Song” as it is sometimes known – is a traditional American folk song that has been recorded by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk and others.  It features in the Cohen brothers’ film, ‘Inside Lewellyn Davis’, in which it is performed by Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac.  So, how did it get its unusual sobriquet, “Dink’s song”?  Well, it was ‘discovered’ by the folklorist, Alan Lomax, when, in 1908, he recorded a black woman called Dink sing it, as she washed clothes on the banks of the Brazos river, in  a few miles from Houston, Texas  This helps to distinguish it from other folk songs also called ‘Fare Thee Well’.  The musical simplicity of the song, which uses only four chords, enables a soulful beauty to shine through.  Dink’s song is essentially about the anguish of longing for a loved-one who has gone.   Lomax and his son, Alan Lomax were the first to publish it—including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, published by Macmillan in 1934.