Ponder if you will, what farm life is like. The work never stops, every day, dawn til dusk, rain and cold or heat and relentless sunshine. There are things to tend to. A rural friend fretted to me in 1975 that the kids were leaving, that they didn’t want to embrace the lifestyle they were born into. They were city bound. This migration from the family farm was illuminated further for me by the Farm Aid Concerts I covered for XM. I have a much greater understanding for this from time spent during Farm Aid with the families, the farmers, and the workers, each with a different skew on this vast subject.
Matraca Berg put out her latest album, The Dreaming Fields, last year. At last, she has done a video for the title track, which is an elegy for her grandparents’ dairy farm. It actually has footage Matraca provided to illustrate.
She says, “The story of the small family farms struggle is so heartbreaking. When my grandparents were too old to work and were forced to sell it off, I felt compelled to write this song. My childhood years at the farm were my happiest and the most magical. I wanted to write a tribute to Elmer and Inga Berg for all their hard, hard work all those years, and for all the big love they gave their family. I will miss that place. A big part of who we were feels gone now.”
Beautiful. Sad.
-Jessie Scott