About The Song
A member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who has also influenced two generations of country song stylists, Linda Ronstadt celebrates her 68th birthday today. Although Parkinson’s disease has robbed her of the ability to sing, Ronstadt’s musical legacy covers six decades and multiple genres, from pop standards to the Mexican music she sang while growing up in Arizona. An 11-time Grammy winner, Ronstadt earned her first gramophone, for Best Country Vocal, Female, in 1975, with her cover of Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You).”
Thirteen years before Ronstadt was born, the Carter Family was in a Camden, New Jersey studio recording A.P. Carter’s arrangement of a traditional folk song, “The Constant Lovers.” The song, which is also known as “I Never Will Marry,” tells the mournful, tragic story of a woman whose lover has left her. With nothing to live for, the woman, who is standing by the water, plunges her “fair body in the ocean so deep.”
Although the structure of the song is basically the same, the lyrics of many of the modern versions of “I Never Will Marry” forsake the suicidal theme of the original for the still rather depressing tale of a lovelorn woman watching the object of her unrequited affection as he gets on a train, never to be heard from again.
This version of the song entered pop-music history in 1977, when Ronstadt included it on her enormously successful LP, Simple Dreams. A Number One album for five consecutive weeks, Simple Dreams put Ronstadt in the same league as the Beatles (on the charts, anyway) when two of the singles released from it, Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou” and the Buddy Holly and the Crickets hit “It’s So Easy,” were in the Top Five at the same time. With songs from the Rolling Stones (“Tumbling Dice”) and Warren Zevon (“Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” a later country hit for Terri Clark) included on it, the LP was even more of a departure from country music than 1976’s Hasten Down the Wind, but Ronstadt continued to pay homage to traditional country and folk music, also covering the cowboy tune, “Old Paint” on the album.
Video
Lyric
[Verse 1]
They say that love’s a gentle thing
But it’s only brought me pain
For the only man I ever loved
Has gone on the mornin’ train[Chorus]
I never will marry
I’ll be no man’s wife
I expect to live single
All the days of my life[Verse 2]
Well, the train pulled out, the whistle blew
With a long and a lonesome moan
He’s gone, he’s gone like the mornin’ dew
And left me all alone[Chorus]
I never will marry
I’ll be no man’s wife
I expect to live single
All the days of my life[Verse 3]
Well, there’s many a change in the winter wind
And a change in the cloud’s design
There’s many a change in a young man’s heart
But never a change in mineYou might also like
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Twenty One Pilots[Chorus]
I never will marry
I’ll be no man’s wife
I expect to live single
All the days of my life