Well, 16 years later now, and I am now 83. Much has passed in this time, and I still haven't found this song, apparently called "Uncle Eph". From a kind of radio "folk opera" maybe, from 30+ years ago.

I can't be crazy to think I heard it. Like maybe when I was a teenager in Southern Illinois listening to the radio with enough "skip" in the air that I sometimes picked up what seemed like surreal and haunting mountain music from some stations in the South (few of us had tv then), which was so new and exciting to me, as opposed to "Rock Around The Clock", etc.

One day I was listening to another sort of "folk opera" (like the kind of thing I might have heard on Prairie Home Companion which I did not even know of, and may not have existed then?). Turned out to be the wonderful play, of which I now have a copy, called "Dark Of the Moon", very occasionally still performed by college troupes, etc., and with a dark story and full of mountain music.

Even when young I was an armchair philosopher, in love with song and story that talked of an appreciation of our short life, and the sadness of having to leave it behind.