Trying to find a song

[melannen]

There is a song that I swear I had on MP3 on a hard drive that died.

It had the line "I do not believe I will ever marry" (or something very close to that) in the lyrics, repeated a least a few times - but it wasn't the traditional ballad with the refrain "I never will marry, I'll be no man's wife" (or if it was, it was a fairly major revision of it.)

It was sung by a female singer in the first person, and it wasn't about a tragic lost love like the traditional ballad; just about a woman who had decided she was never going to marry and was resigned to the fact. It was sort of in the folk/rockabilly/country/blues spectrum somewhere and had fairly simple instrumentals with the woman's voice the focus of the music.

I've tried googling the bit of lyrics I remember, but I'm getting nothing helpful: I had a lot of fairly obscure/unsigned folky type stuff on that drive, so it's possible the lyrics aren't online. Does anyone know this song?

Comments

[naraht]

Wild guess here... Natalie Merchant, "If no one ever marries me"?

[melannen]

Not the one I was thinking of, but still awesome! Thank you!

[elf]

Nope. But Googling turns up a couple of other possibilities:

Never will I marry
"Never, never will I marry
Never, never will I wed
Born to wander solitary
Wide my world, narrow my bed
Never never never will I marry
Born to wander 'til I'm dead"

Matrimony, by Whiskeytown
"I don't believe I care to marry
Though I cannot explain exactly why
It somehow seems to me that matrimony is misery
Simply a faster way to die."

[melannen]

Matrimony by Whiskeytown it is, yay! And I was starting to think I'd imagined it. Thank you so much! Clearly my google skills need work.

[zana16]

Huh. I remember seeing a song along these lines years ago, in the songbook Rise Up Singing, but I'm not able to find it now. But if it's in that songbook, it means the song is at least 25 years old...

[zana16]

Wait! "I Never Will Marry". Several versions, one by Texas Gladden, using parts of a British broadside ballad "Down by the Sea Shore" -- but Gladden's version is more melancholy and despair. Joan Baez and the Weavers did a version written by Fred Hellerman; the Kossoy Sister and Pete Seeger and Bill Harrell & The Virgs also did versions.

Hope that helps!

[melannen]

That's the one I mentioned in the post. :D It kept coming up in all my searches but I was pretty sure that wasn't it.