Even if you could imagine hearing this song when it was first released as a 78, it is difficult to make any sense of it – and utterly impossible when anyone else performs it – because its operative religious sensibility is as obscure to us (and by “us,” I also mean our “fundamentalist” contemporaries) as John Wesley’s is. Or John Bunyan’s, for that matter. Far from being a wish for any kind of “escape” – even from The Depression, let alone “depression” – it promises only the confirming certainty of death in the face of the uncertainty that is this worldly veil of tears. That the Carters could believe in this doleful cosmology to their bones and still be, by all accounts, as “worldly” as any other performers with national reputations could be at that time, does not make its logic any less uncompromising. They knew no other, and it gives their recording its strange momentum, insofar as it essentially defies the idea of “momentum,” itself. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” is thinking outside the box, as it were. “God’s word declared it would be so” is so far inside the same box that its edges might as well be curving horizons.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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