Suffet, I've never doubted the female prisoner DID make the verse up herself. I surely hope so. I wish we had a chance to hear what else she sang.

Catherine, about switching gender in songs, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Depends. "Wish I Was a Single Girl Again" has such a female identity I wouldn't change it for anything. In this song I had a personal connection; the rider as she came through the song to my perception was definitely female, and there was a personal story attached, nuff sed. However, in Lomax, the rider was plainly intended to be male.

Why should there be any hard-and-fast rule? You take over any song as your own when you sing it. If you can make the connection across genders, you do. If not, a switch may have to happen if you're going to sing the song at all.

I sing it direct, person-to-person: "I know you rider, you gonna miss me when I'm gone." But all noted approaches are possible.

Elvis? Which Elvis?

Yes, I admit the word "I" is beginning to get monotonous. Sorry folks. It's not conceit, it's just been tempting to answer all the questions by going deep into the past and trying to reconstruct it as truthfully as I know how, because it does seem to have a bearing on how we all got from there to here in the folk music world. But it sure must be a bore to anyone who hasn't that quirk!

But Al Gore never said he invented the internet -- that was just right wing propaganda -- and I sure as hell didn't invent this song. I just happened to be the person who, as I said at the beginning, started the chain by lifting it off the page, arranging and performing it.

Because I feel a strong personal connection to it, part of the intriguing weirdness, for me, has been finding out how far the song has traveled, and trying to work out how that happened. Guess I probably have gone on at too great a length. Put it down to a fatal fascination with song history, even right down to the nits and the grits.

Bob