DESCRIPTION:
Worried Man Blues is a traditional blues or American song that appears to date from approximately the middle of the 19th century. It was recorded by the Carter Family in 1930 and Woody Guthrie in 1940 as well as many other artists right up to the present day. As with many folk songs there are a variety of lyrical variants.

The origins of the song are lost to history. Some believe the song tells the story of an escaped slave, others believe it is the story of an escaped convict recaptured. However, the lyrics as presented here seem to tell an entirely different story if you're familiar with more American history than what public schools tend to teach these days.

I suspect these lyrics, at least, are telling the story of a conscripted or convict laborer on the Transcontinental Railroad (or possibly another railroad but the rush to complete the Transcontinental line before congress lost interest resulted in some fairly egregious practices). It wasn't terribly unusual during that period for a railroad boss who needed more labor than he could entice with wages (or the wages his bosses were willing to pay) to visit a local sheriff or judge - a bit of money would change hands - and suddenly men whose only crime was being adrift with no visible means of support, or perhaps partaking a little too freely at the local saloon and sleeping it off somewhere other than safe in bed, would find themselves sentenced to hard labor (probably not the 21 years cited in the song, however). The hard labor just happened to be working on that best of all public works, the railroad.

The lyrics seem to fit that scenario quite closely.
1) He laid down to sleep (in public)
2) He woke up facing charges that he expected to result in a simple fine
3) He finds himself sentenced to work on the "Rocky Mountain Line"

So...as you can see...politicians, judges, and da man being owned by the robber barons of the day is nothing new... :)

Recorded on a Flip HD using the internal microphone. The audio was stripped off and a touch of reverb and compression was added because Corel Video Pro 4.0 insisted on adding a bunch of clicks and pops to the audio when rendering the video until I moved the audio to a separate track.