Another Man Done Gone
(Public Domain)
Another man done gone. [3x}
Down to New Orleans,
Another man done gone.
I didn’t know his name. [5x]
He had a long chain on. [5x]
He killed another man. [5x]
Another man done gone (reprise).
John Avery Lomax, ethnomusicologist, met Vera Hall (1902-1964) in the 1930s and recorded her for the Library of Congress.
Hall was born in Payneville, Alabama, just outside of Livingston in Sumter County.
In 1917 Hall married Nash Riddle, a coal miner, and gave birth to their daughter, Minnie Ada. Riddle was killed in 1920. Though Hall sang her entire life, learning spirituals such as “I Got the Home in the Rock” and “When I’m Standing Wondering, Lord, Show Me the Way” from her mother, Agnes, and her father, Efron “Zully” Hall, it was not until the late 1930s that Hall’s singing gained national exposure through the Lomax recordings.
The Library of Congress played her recording of it at a ceremony commemorating the 75th Anniversary of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862. The British Broadcasting System played Hall’s recording of “Another Man Done Gone” in 1943 as a sampling of American folk music.
I have carried this song around in my head for thirty-some years and finally came across a guitar part for it while trying out C-minor tuning [low to high: C-G-C-G-C-Eb].