FRIDAY: Each evening, it's strangers in the night!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 8, 2025

Hello Stranger, an origin story: Every night, there they are:

Strangers in the night!

They bring their mission to cable news. If we lived within a more mature journalistic culture, their conduct on those "cable news" shows would be reported and discussed.

They'll be back on your screens tonight, engaged in their corporate messaging. Some of them probably know what they're doing. Some of them probably don't.

Last week, we pondered Hello Stranger, one of The Carter Family's trademark songs. Mike Seeger performed it as the first cut on his Vanguard album, his one album for a major label. 

Emmylou Harris has performed it again and again. Don't cheat yourself out of hearing the version she recorded with the late Nicolette Larson.

The lyrics start by telling us that some stranger is also a friend. Someone is headed to prison in this melancholy song, but it's never quite clear who that person might be, or what he or she may have done.

As with some of the greatest songs, the story telling is imprecise. At one point, the singer says this:

Weeping like a willow, mourning like a dove
I'm weeping like a willow, mourning like a dove
There's a girl up the country that I really love.

The lyrics suggest a desire to return to an earlier, more familiar place—to an earlier place which made more sense. In the face of our flailing nation's broken political culture, those mournful lyrics seem to make Hello Stranger a song for our own disordered time.

So where did Hello Stranger come from? Why did the Carters perform it? What did Mike Seeger hear in the song? What did Emmylou Harris hear?

(We get the impression that Harris may have heard a great deal in the song.)

We can't answer the last two questions. Regarding the Carter Family, we ran across this representation in a comment to a blog post about the song. We don't know if this is accurate:

JANE (12/10/19): "Hello stranger" was a common "come-on" line which Appalachian prostitutes would say to potential customers while working the street corners of coal patch towns in the early 20th century. 

At the time it was released, "Hello Stranger" brought the Carters much grief and "Oh shame on you" reactions from do-right-up-tight Appalachian neighbor folks, horrified at an expression of sympathy for the whore, the fallen, the prisoner, the outcast, the derelict. Said folks seem to have never studied much about what Jesus actually said, though often they might cite his name to justify their righteousness while condemning the sinfulness of anyone who wasn't them. 

It's a pretty darn spectacular song in all dimensions.

It surely is an evocative song. In some ways, that account, while well-intentioned, may be a bit too "Oh shame on them" for us.

We don't know if that account is accurate. On the other hand, this:

At the dawn of the recording industry, and living within a conservative culture where performance of music outside a church setting was sometimes suspect, the Carters would post handbills of the type described in this lengthy musical history:

“Look! Victor artists A.P. Carter and the Carter Family will give a musical program at Elm Hill School August 10th…This program is morally good."

You can see one such handbill right here.

This program is morally good! Some other types of programs maybe and possibly aren't.

Jesus said to welcome the stranger. All around us, we see strangers in the night, right there on our "cable news" channels.

Tomorrow: The sitting president's numbers from nowhere. Also, doggedly, Bessent hangs on.