I belong

Nobody knows who first sang “Walking Boss”, or exactly which stretch of Southern labor it came out of. It reaches us through Clarence Ashley, who recorded it with Doc Watson for Folkways in the early sixties, banjo dry as dust: a workman sizing up the foreman who owns his days and telling him where his loyalty actually lies — “I don’t belong to you… I belong to that steel-drivin’ crew.”

Willie Watson — once of Old Crow Medicine Show, since gone deep into the old repertoire — cut it for Folksinger Vol. 2 in 2017, stripped to fingerpicked guitar, a cracked voice and a harmonica. That harmonica is what gets me: the way it swells up the mood between verses, filling in everything the words refuse to say. Watson doesn’t dress the song up or explain it. He just stands where Ashley stood and lets a century of bad bosses speak through him.