‘Corn In The Fields . . .’

 by whiteray

We return this week to autumnal songs and find one on The Band’s second album, a 1969 self-titled release. 

That’s perhaps not correct: If the word “autumnal” refers only to the season, then we find one track on that long-adored album. If it refers to songs filled with elegy and reverie, we find at least four more. This week, I’ll offer the season-specific tune, and next week, I’ll push my definition of “autumnal” and choose another from The Band. 

My maternal grandfather was a farmer all his working life. Married in 1915, he and my grandmother had three daughters by the mid-1920s and worked a small farm south of the rural Minnesota town of Wabasso. They lost that farm during the Depression but managed to buy another one not far away, two miles east of a town called Lamberton. And there they stayed for more than thirty years, finally selling the farm and moving into town in 1972. 

There is a long history of farming unions in the U.S., a history I know mostly through my grandfather’s opinions. During the mid-1960s, when the news on television showed members of the relatively young National Farm Organization (NFO) dumping truckloads of milk rather than sell it for a price seen as too low, my grandfather shook his head. That wasn’t the way to go, he said. The NFO was too radical. 

For years – and I have no idea how long – Grampa had been a member of the Farm Bureau, a movement started in the early Twentieth Century as a lobbying organization for farmers. It was a far less radical organization than the NFO. It’s good to recall, though, that in the mid-1960s, when I was a little sprout spending a portion of my summer vacations on the farm, Grampa was in his seventies, and the too-radical members of the NFO would likely have been four or five decades younger. In its time, the ideas of the Farm Bureau may have been seen as radical; I don’t know. And the actions of the members of the NFO may have been reasonable for the mid-1960s. 

My grandfather was a quiet man. I’m sure he had many opinions that he shared with his contemporaries. I recall two he shared with me: If you’re gonna buy farm machinery, go with John Deere. (And one of my favorite baseball caps is a John Deere cap in glorious green and yellow.) And the Farm Bureau was the way for farmers to go. 

So. when I hear the first chords and then the lyrics of The Band’s  “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” I think about two things. First, I think about the advance of autumn – what with the “scarecrow and a yellow moon” and the carnival on the edge of town. 

And then I think about my grandfather. Written by Robbie Robertson, the group’s ode to farm workers and their struggles (set in some mythical portion, I think, of the early Twentieth Century when the narrator works “for the union, ’cause she’s so good to me”), doesn’t quite match with my grandfather’s life; he owned his farm and didn’t have a boss man, as the song’s narrator does. 

But I hear the narrator’s struggles, and I hear portions of what life likely was like for my grandfather and his family. So even if it’s not a perfect match, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” sets me in a bittersweet autumn, and I think about my grandfather who lost one farm and then held another for the rest of his working life: 

Corn in the fields
Listen to the rice when the wind blows ’cross the water
King Harvest has surely come

I work for the union
‘Cause she's so good to me
And I’m bound to come out on top
That’s where she said I should be
I will hear every word the boss may say
For he’s the one who hands me down my pay
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay
I'm a union man, now, all the way

The smell of the leaves
From the magnolia trees in the meadow
King Harvest has surely come

Dry summer, then comes fall
Which I depend on most of all
Hey, rainmaker, can’t you hear the call?
Please let these crops grow tall
Long enough I've been up on Skid Row
And it’s plain to see, I’ve nothing to show
I'm glad to pay those union dues
Just don’t judge me by my shoes

Scarecrow and a yellow moon
Pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town
King Harvest has surely come

Last year, this time, wasn’t no joke
My whole barn went up in smoke
Our horse Jethro, well, he went mad
I can’t ever remember things bein’ that bad
Then here come a man with a paper and a pen
Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end
And then, if they don’t give us what we like
He said, “men, that’s when you gotta go on strike”

Corn in the fields
Listen to the rice when the wind blows ’cross the water
King Harvest has surely come