Bob Wills wrote this song for the western movie “Take Me Back to Oklahoma” starring Wills and Tex Ritter. In the movie the song is an up tempo swing tune (sung on a moving stagecoach) but the field version that I found at the Library of Congress is slow and with a feeling of longing for home. It was sung by a man named Merle Lovelle in a Farm Security Administration camp in 1941. This demonstrates that not only can folk songs become commercial but the process can work the other way as well.


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