Like a Motherless Child

A repeating theme in songs is the feeling of being a motherless child

Photo by Nuno Alberto on Unsplash

Sometimes 

 I feel 

like a motherless child

Intro

The pop group Boney M. was singing this in the song Motherless Child long ago, at the beginning of their career, back in 1977.

There are not a lot of words in that song — just a repeated outcry of loneliness and being away from home, too long to have any hope for getting home again.

Is being without hope, homeless, the same as being motherless?

What were they really singing about?

Songs and their effects

Imagine hundreds of young people at a disco, dancing to the disco beats (yes, there was a time when a disco actually played disco music) — jumping up and down, drinking, singing along, some maybe kissing.

Boney M. had an unusual style, mixing deeply emotional texts and popular dance rhythms. They covered a lot of ground with both historical and social themes, spiced up with such as the science fiction fantasy Nightflight to Venus.

While you can probably find sexual undertones in some of their songs, they also had hits that weren’t close to that. Not the least Ma Baker about a famous American gangster mother known under that nickname, and Brown Girl in the Ring, a Jamaican children's song.

The varied themes and topics were talked about and analyzed in pop shows on TV and the radio, and in youth magazines, where fans could get a full world to dive into, telling all kinds of things about their idols and their songs.

On the record player — or cassette player perhaps — people, and probably mostly young people, would enjoy listening to the music and maybe try to imagine what it was all about, while they were looking at the idol posters they had hung up on the wall.

As the texts were all abstract glimpses of a world that was mostly unknown to teenagers, this activity, along with the dancing and the socializing with friends around the music, became an important part of their upbringing and maturing.

Disco was supplemented with reggae and other exotic rhythms, and it all helped people, young or less young, to understand that there is a big world out there, full of inspiration, and full of people to learn about. People who sometimes have problems and could need some help.

They were the influencers of their time, minus the product placements.

Long and deep roots

Paul Robeson actually sang this song — same melody, less disco, and a slight variation in the lyrics — all the way back in the 1920s. And he wasn’t the first, as it was by then a traditional African-American spiritual. In 1871, for instance, the Fisk Jubilee Singers sang this song on a fundraising tour. And it has been sung by many others, both sooner and later than Boney M.’s take, including Prince, Barbara Hendricks and Tom Jones, to name a few.

I think that Boney M’s version has been heavily inspired by a previous version by Liz Mitchell and Les Humphries Singers¹, which is not strange at all, as Liz Mitchell also was the singer in Boney M, giving this song its special sound.

It is quite obvious that Boney M. and the surrounding team wanted to refer to this traditional song for a reason: bringing in a focus on something that had taken up a lot of media space just a few years earlier, namely Malcolm X, Black Power, Martin Luther King, etc., and covered by Alex Haley in his book Roots, published in 1976, becoming a TV series 1977 — the immense human disaster of black slavery and its aftermath with many years of discrimination and segregation.

Pop music and dancing, yes, but a lot deeper than it looks at a first glance.

More motherless

Moby is a musician and songwriter known for using more words in his lyrics than most others and of a more poetic nature, and he picked up the theme of the motherless child 40 years after Boney M. in the song Like a Motherless Child.

Moby has a way with words, and in this song, he excels in rhyming — making the song itself almost a rap in its nature.

His song is not the same old one, it is new — and even though his lyrics can be a bit tricky to understand (I think), it is definitely about loneliness and the relation to a woman, but not necessarily the mother.

Steve Miller Band had a hit with Motherless Children, and this is a somewhat different song as it does describe the hardship and sadness, but doesn’t seem to go any deeper than the motherlessness itself.

Eric Clapton made a similar song, also called Motherless Children, with very much of a similar content, but later he added another: Motherless Child, which gets into the complexity of mixing girlfriend with mother. So this song is not really about being motherless.

Maybe there is an element in human nature that makes people see a mother in every woman? Not only as in the old story of Oedipus but also as a caretaker and a guard against the world’s trouble.

The background for “feeling like a motherless child”

As it might be guessed from the text, the expression stems from long ago in the USA of slavery, where children could be sold away from their mothers — and sent far away to work on another farm.

A sudden loss of the only safety they knew of, their main and perhaps only personal relation, their only belonging. That would definitely cause a deep scar in the soul and more likely become the root source of lifelong trauma.

A profound loss. The loss of life's meaning and of the belief in humanity.

Outro

Referring to this will underline how lost you feel, and how it was somehow done to you. At the same time, you show recognition and sympathy for the historical motherless children, not at all guilty of their lonesomeness, their loss, and their mistreatment.

Like no children are ever guilty in any such thing — or in anything at all.

1. Check out Liz Mitchell and Les Humphries Singers’ version on YouTube.