Appalachian Figures
In the early 2000s, the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? turned “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” into a global hit. Long before that soundtrack and long before the Stanley Brothers or Bob Dylan sang the song, a quiet singer from Wayne County, Kentucky stepped into a Chicago studio and cut the first commercially released recording of it.
His name was Emry Arthur. His story runs from Elk Spring Valley and the courthouse square at Monticello to Indianapolis boarding houses, northern recording studios, and finally a modest grave in Indiana. Along the way, his records captured a slice of Appalachian life that might otherwise have slipped away.
Elk Spring Valley: A Singing Family in Wayne County
Most sources now agree that Emry Paul (often spelled “Penniecuff”) Arthur was born on September 17, 1902 in Elk Spring Valley, a rural community just outside Monticello in Wayne County, Kentucky.
Genealogical work on the Arthur family links him to parents Harrison Arthur and Sarah C. Smith and to a wider network of Arthurs and Smiths rooted in Wayne County. Local histories and music writers describe Harrison as a respected singer and informal song collector who traded ballads, hymns, and sentimental pieces across the Elk Spring Valley neighborhood. Emry and his brothers Henry and Sam grew up in that environment, learning instruments and songs in a community where making music was part of daily life.
Wayne County sat within the Upper Cumberland region, a borderland of Kentucky and Tennessee that folklorist William Lynwood Montell later characterized as unusually rich in grassroots music. The county seat of Monticello developed a reputation as a musical crossroads. One locality study of the town notes that its musicians included Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford as well as “Emry Arthur and his brothers,” underlining that the Arthur family belonged to a broader circle of working musicians and songsters around the square.
In this setting, a hunting accident changed Arthur’s musical path. Accounts drawn from Tony Russell and repeated in later summaries describe how an accident left him with a damaged arm. He could no longer play fiddle with any finesse, so he shifted to harmonica and simpler strummed guitar patterns while focusing more on singing. The limitation nudged him toward a vocal style that carried old ballads and hymns with plain but powerful intensity.
One of the most important neighbors in that world was Richard “Dick” Burnett, a partially blind fiddler and songwriter from Monticello. Burnett sold printed song sheets and a small 1913 songbook titled Songs Sung by R. D. Burnett, The Blind Man, which included an autobiographical “Farewell Song” beginning with the line that would become famous as “I am a man of constant sorrow.” Burnett later recalled that his Arthur neighbors shared songs with him and that Emry learned “Farewell Song” from him in those Wayne County years.
From Monticello to Indianapolis
Like many Appalachian families in the early twentieth century, the Arthurs followed work north. Census records and grave indexes show the family scattered between Wayne County and Indiana by the early 1920s. A Find A Grave memorial for infant Mildred May Arthur places her birth in Indianapolis in 1921 and death in 1923, reflecting one of Emry’s earliest documented ties to Indiana during those years of migration.
By the mid 1920s, Emry himself had settled in Indianapolis, a growing industrial city that drew southern migrants into its factories and boarding houses. Russell’s biography, echoed in later reference works, notes that Arthur could not make a living as a full time musician in Wayne County. He took wage work in Indianapolis and sang on the side, building a repertoire that blended the old mountain tradition, nineteenth century parlor songs, and newer gospel pieces.
That move put him close to the northern recording industry. Labels such as Vocalion and Gennett were scouting the Midwest for “hillbilly” and gospel talent. When scouts heard Arthur, likely through local performances or word of mouth, he was within train distance of Chicago studios and already knew how to front a small group.
Cutting “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow”
In January 1928, Vocalion brought Arthur to Chicago. Recording logs reconstructed from label files show him in the studio over several days with his brother Henry and at least one unidentified guitarist and steel guitarist. On January 18 he recorded a solo of “I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow,” cut on matrix C 1539 / C 1540 and released as Vocalion 5208, backed with “Down in Tennessee Valley.”
Archival work by Charles Wolfe and Todd Harvey, drawing on these recording ledgers, argues that this 1928 Vocalion disc is the first commercially issued version of the song. Burnett had recorded his own setting for Columbia in 1927, but Columbia never released it. Arthur’s record was the one southern listeners could actually buy in a general store or hear on a neighbor’s windup phonograph.
Comparisons of Burnett’s 1913 text with the Vocalion lyrics show how Arthur adapted the song. Burnett’s second stanza refers to blindness, fitting his own biography. Arthur replaces that line with the more general phrase “six long years I’ve been in trouble,” a shift that later versions by the Stanley Brothers, Dylan, and many others would follow. In other words, the wording so many people now recognize as the heart of the song comes from a Wayne County singer trying to fit a neighbor’s ballad to his own life.
The record sold well enough that Vocalion kept calling Arthur back. As Todd Harvey notes, label correspondence and sales figures persuaded Vocalion that Arthur’s sacred sides in particular had a steady market among transplanted southerners. For the rest of 1928 and into 1929, Emry Arthur became one of the most frequently recorded Appalachian voices in Chicago studios.
Hymns, Murder Ballads, and Hillbilly Blues
The Vocalion sessions reveal how wide Arthur’s repertoire really was. In his very first date, on January 17, 1928, he and Henry cut gospel standards including “Love Lifted Me,” “Shining for the Master,” and “The Little Black Train Is Coming” along with a nautical hymn, “Heave Ho, the Anchor.” Within forty eight hours he had moved on to sentimental pieces such as “Goodbye, My Lover, Goodbye” and “I’ll Remember You, Love, In My Prayers,” all tracked with the same small family band.
That balance between sacred and secular continued as Vocalion brought him back to Indianapolis for sessions in June 1928. Those dates produced some of the most imaginative sides in his catalog: “Wandering Gypsy Girl,” “Going Around the World,” and “Nobody’s Business,” along with revival pieces sung with a small chorus credited as the Cumberland or Arthur’s Sacred Singers.
“Going Around the World” in particular turned out to have a long afterlife. The song’s refrain about traveling “with a banjo picking girl” resurfaced a decade later in the Coon Creek Girls’ 1938 recording “Banjo Pickin’ Girl,” which scholars and discographers now describe as directly descended from Arthur’s record. In that way, a Wayne County singer’s playful studio experiment helped launch one of the classic women’s bluegrass numbers.
Later Chicago sessions in 1928 and early 1929 broadened the mix even further. Arthur cut topical songs like “Train Whistle Blues” and “The Rich Man and Joe Smith,” blues tinged pieces like “Empty Pocket Blues,” and comic numbers such as “My Girl, She’s a Lulu.” In January 1929 he paired with Illinois musician William Rexroat on “The Wanderer” and other duets.
Taken together, these sides show Arthur as more than a one song figure. He was a classic Appalachian songster, comfortable with hymns, sentimental parlor songs, older British ballads, and newly minted blues and novelty pieces, moving between them as recording men asked for “something sad,” “something lively,” or “something sacred.”
Paramount, Lonesome Ace, and Della Hatfield
By 1929, Arthur’s personal life took a sharp turn. Tony Russell notes that his first marriage collapsed that year. Emry left Indianapolis, moved to Wisconsin, and found work with the Wisconsin Chair Company, the furniture firm that owned Paramount Records.
Paramount’s Grafton studio quickly put him back on record. A September 1929 session produced “The Broken Wedding” and “I’m Always Thinking of You,” powerful ballads issued on Paramount 3221 and later reissued under the budget Broadway label. Around October and November, he began recording with Della Hatfield, the woman who became his second wife. Together they cut murder ballads such as “The Bluefield Murder” and “George Collins” and love songs like “Jennie My Own True Lover” and “A Railroader Lover for Me,” all issued on Paramount and Broadway discs whose surviving labels still list “Emry Arthur and Della Hatfield.”
In 1931 Arthur and Hatfield returned to Grafton for what may be his finest Paramount session. There he remade “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow” with Della singing harmony, cut the reflective “Short Life of Trouble,” and recorded “The Married Man” and “There’s a Treasure Up in Heaven,” among other titles. These recordings have been widely reissued and studied as some of the clearest windows into Depression era Appalachian song in the northern studios.
Around the same time, Arthur briefly stepped into the business side of music through William Myer, a songwriter from Richlands, Virginia. As a Smithsonian Folkways booklet explains, Myer founded the short lived Lonesome Ace label just before the Depression, releasing only three known discs. Two featured Dock Boggs and one featured Emry Arthur, whose participation links Wayne County’s musical network directly to this small but historically significant label.
Last Records and Quiet Years
When the recording industry collapsed in the early 1930s, so did Arthur’s recording opportunities. One rejected side for Gennett in 1931 appears in discographies, but the master seems to have been lost. Only in January 1935 did he have one last moment in the studio, this time for Decca. That session produced four coupling numbers, including “Six Months in Jail Ain’t Long” and “The Bootlegger’s Lullaby,” released on Decca 5127 and remembered today as forerunners of later bluegrass takes on crime and drink.
After that Decca date, the surviving record is mostly genealogical. Discographies show no further commercial sessions. Reference works and later biographies agree that Emry and Della eventually returned to Indianapolis, where he found non musical work and faded from the public eye even as his records continued to circulate quietly among collectors.
An Indiana death index and a Find A Grave memorial record his death on August 22, 1967 in Indianapolis, with burial in South Mound Cemetery at New Castle in Henry County. Della outlived him by nearly forty years. Some of their relatives rest in the same cemetery, tying the music quite literally back to family ground.
From Local Ballad to Global Anthem
If Emry Arthur’s name faded, his most famous song did not. Beginning in 1950, the Stanley Brothers popularized “Man of Constant Sorrow” on radio and records, using a text that scholars trace to the Burnett songbook and the Arthur Vocalion disc. Folk revivalists like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan adopted the piece in the early 1960s, again leaning on Arthur’s lyric pattern.
Todd Harvey’s study of Dylan’s version walks this chain in detail: Burnett’s 1913 “Farewell Song” in Monticello, Arthur’s 1928 recording in Chicago with Henry on banjo, Arthur’s 1931 duet version with Della, and then the Stanley Brothers and Dylan borrowing from that composite tradition.
The song’s influence did not stop there. Sarah Ogan Gunning recalled that she modeled her own “Girl of Constant Sorrow” on a 78 by Emry Arthur that she had heard in the mountains, and later commentators note similar melodic or lyrical echoes in a host of labor and protest songs. What began as a Wayne County ballad about hardship and faith passed through Arthur’s voice into the bloodstream of American folk and protest music.
When O Brother, Where Art Thou? hit theaters in 2000, its soundtrack once again encouraged listeners to ask where “Man of Constant Sorrow” had come from. Popular articles usually name Dick Burnett as the writer and the Stanleys as the popularizers. Increasingly, they also point to Emry Arthur of Elk Spring Valley as the singer whose records carried the song out of Wayne County and into the wider world.
Why Emry Arthur Matters for Appalachian History
Seen from Wayne County, the outline of Emry Arthur’s life is bittersweet. A boy grows up on a small farm in Elk Spring Valley amid family singing parties and courthouse square musicians. A hunting accident limits his playing but not his voice. Economic necessity sends him north, where he works ordinary jobs and spends a few intense years riding trains to Chicago and Grafton to cut songs into shellac. The industry crashes, and he returns to a quiet life, dying far from the Monticello streets where his neighbors once traded ballads.
Yet the records remain. Through Vocalion, Paramount, Lonesome Ace, and Decca ledgers we can track when and where he sang. Through reissues like Old Homestead’s I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow, Volume One and Yazoo’s The Music of Kentucky, Volume 2, listeners can still hear how an Elk Spring Valley singer phrased old hymns, murder ballads, blues, and the haunting “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
For Appalachian history, Arthur matters in at least three ways.
First, he anchors Wayne County’s place in the story of early country music. Alongside Dick Burnett, Leonard Rutherford, and other Monticello figures, he shows how a small Upper Cumberland community contributed directly to the commercial catalog that defined “hillbilly” music for urban audiences.
Second, his discography offers a rare, documented snapshot of what ordinary Appalachian singers actually performed in the 1920s: not only ancient ballads or revival hymns but also Tin Pan Alley pieces, comic songs, blues influenced numbers, and local compositions about trains, bootleggers, and jail.
Third, his career illustrates how fragile musical memory can be. Without label files, discographers, and reissue producers, Emry Arthur would be a name in a cemetery index. Instead, his voice continues to ring whenever a modern singer picks up “Man of Constant Sorrow” or “Short Life of Trouble,” whether they know his story or not.
For those of us who care about Appalachian history, listening closely to Emry Arthur means hearing Elk Spring Valley in the grooves of a 78. It means recognizing that the soundtrack of this region is not only coal trains and fiddle breakdowns but also the quieter songs of men and women who left home, carried their music north, and left behind records that still speak for them.
Sources & Further Reading
Praguefrank’s Country Discography 2 entry for Emry Arthur, which compiles Vocalion, Paramount, Broadway, Gennett, and Decca matrix numbers, recording dates, locations, and issues, largely drawn from Tony Russell’s Country Music Records and original label ledgers.countrydiscoghraphy2.blogspot.com+1
Discogs entries for Old Homestead I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow, Volume One (OHCS 190) and Yazoo’s The Music of Kentucky, Vol. 2: Early American Rural Classics, 1927–37, documenting the reissue of Arthur’s Vocalion and Paramount sides.Discogs+2Discogs+2
Smithsonian Folkways booklet for BRI Records’ Lonesome Ace compilation, which discusses William Myer’s short lived Lonesome Ace label and notes that it issued two Dock Boggs discs and a single Emry Arthur record before folding.Folkways Media
Indiana and Kentucky vital records as collated in FamilySearch and Find A Grave, especially entries for Emry Penniecuff Arthur (1902–1967), Mildred May Arthur (1921–1923), and related Arthurs buried at South Mound Cemetery in New Castle, Indiana.Find A Grave+2Find A Grave+2
Song and variant documentation for “Farewell Song” and “Man of Constant Sorrow” in SecondHandSongs and related databases, which tie Burnett’s 1913 publication to Arthur’s 1928 recording and subsequent covers.SecondHandSongs+2SecondHandSongs+2
Tony Russell, Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost (Oxford University Press, 2007), chapter on Emry Arthur, which remains the most detailed biographical narrative of his life and recording career and underpins many later reference entries.Wikipedia+1
Charles K. Wolfe, “The Original Man of Constant Sorrow: The Mystery of Emry Arthur,” Bluegrass Unlimited 36 (April 2002): 46–51, and related discussions in Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky, which explore Arthur’s Wayne County roots, his relationship with Dick Burnett, and the early history of the song.wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu+1
Todd Harvey, “Bob Dylan’s ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’,” Oral Tradition 22, no. 1 (2007), which traces the song’s transmission from Burnett’s 1913 songbook through Arthur’s 1928 and 1931 recordings to later bluegrass and folk revival versions.Oral Tradition+1
William Lynwood Montell, Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), for regional context on the Upper Cumberland’s musical communities, including Monticello and Wayne County.wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu
Online biographies and essays, including the English and German Wikipedia entries on Emry Arthur, Blind Dog Radio’s narrative profile, Old Time Blues label history posts, and the Old Time Party locality essay on Monticello, which synthesize Russell and Wolfe’s research and help situate Arthur among other Wayne County musicians.Wikipedia+4blinddogradio.blogspot.com+4oldtimeblues.net+4