A song that I can really connect a person to is a country song sung by the country singer Jason Michael Carroll, which is the song “I Can Sleep When I’m Dead” and the song relates to one of my family members, who is my uncle.
My uncle was born in 1944 where as a child he grew up on a tobacco farm, raising the main cash crop tobacco, along with other things such as cows, chickens, hogs, and other crops too. As my uncle became older and was able to start helping around the farm, he began to learn what real work was because, when you live and grow up on a tobacco farm you have to plant the plants, let them grow, keep the weeds out of them, and at the end out all that it’s time to pull all of it, and trust me I tried it and it’s exhausting, hard, and very time consuming, plus on top of all that at harvest time, your pulling tobacco six days a week through the whole season. Basically when the whole crop is pulled you have to cure it then get it sold in time, because if you don’t you’re losing money and profit for that whole season. Whenever you sell the whole crop, you basically just cross your fingers and hope you did good so you can pay for all the fuel you spent and the hard labor you put towards it. After my uncle telling me all that I realized just how much little time you have and hardly any time for sleep.
I was really surprised though at my uncle because for being 65 and raising tobacco for all those years till 1995, when he quit, he can about still hang with my buddy and me but we have to tell him he’s slow sometimes so we always have to give him a hard time and tell him to hurry up, but it never works and he just ends up flicking us off and then we would all three just start cracking up. But, to wrap this whole thing up, I believe my uncle puts a new meaning to the song.
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"I Can Sleep When I'm Dead" is one of the most pefect songs for tobacco farming. My grandfather raised tobacco for many years. I always remember him saying there was not enough hours in a day to all that needed to be done. I sure he got very little sleep because of all tobacco farming entails. I tried picking tobacco one time and I do mean ONE time,if it was something I had to every day, I would starve and go to hell. There is no way that I could do what farmers have to do just to break even. Hats off to the farmers that provide so much that we use everyday.
ReplyDeleteI have never actually head this song but I love the story you told. I bet it is hard work farming tobacco. I will behonest and say i dont think I could do it for all those years. As sasott says Hats off to the farmers. I do not think they get paid near as much as they should. breaking even for that labor, we really should be thankful for their hard work.
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