The song opens with a deliberately conventional opening ('Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale...
').
Each verse contains at least one tragic event, and Dylan hides the fact that the narrator is a woman to the end of verse 4 ('and my school it was cut as I quit in the spring, to marry John Thomas a miner'.)
The song ends bleakly (My children will go as soon as they grow, for there ain't nothing here now to hold them).
Within this apparently restricting and morose format, referred to as a "formally conservative exercise in first-person significant tonal and expressive variation, and the song is considered by some to be one of his most effective in the 'folk-song' genre.
News RSS