Single Girl

1.  When I was single, 
I went dressed so fine,
Now I am married, 
go ragged all the time.

CHORUS:
Lord, I wish I was a single girl again. (2)

2. Dishes to wash 
and spring to go to,
Now I am married, 
I've everything to do. 

(CHO.)

3. When I was single, 
eat biscuits and pie
Now I am married, 
eat cornbread or die. 

(CHO.)

4. When I was single, 
my shoes they did screak,
Now I am married, 
my shoes they do leak. 

(CHO.)

5. Two little children, 
lyin' in the bed,
Both of them so hungry, Lord, 
they can't hold up their heads. 

(CHO.)

6. Wash um and dress um 
and send um to school,
Long comes that drunkard 
and calls them a fool. 

(CHO.)

7. When I was single, 
marryin' was my crave,
Now I am married, 
I'm troubled to my grave. 

(CHO.)


Collected, adapted and arranged by Alan Lomax. “Many of the women are pretty in youth; but hard toil in house and field, early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention, and ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon warp and age them.  At thirty or thirty-five a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent.  Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over her baby, or bending to pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her lord flings on the floor as he enters from the woods – what wonder?” Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 1913.