The Old Spinning Wheel

My siblings and I remember that sometimes our mom, while working around the house, would sing:

There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago.

That was as much of the song as she ever sang, so it's as much as I ever knew. I think she said her mom used to sing it. Tonight it occurred to me to look the song up, both the lyrics and someone singing it. I listened at youtube to a number of big band versions recorded in the 1930s, when my mom was a child, but they either had so much orchestration that they were overblown or they were so jazzy that they did not have that poignancy that I associate with the song. I liked best this very simple version sung by characters on the TV show "The Waltons."



The words are:

There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago,
Spinning dreams of an old-fashioned garden,
And a maid with her old-fashioned beau.

Sometimes it seems that I can hear her in the twilight,
At the organ softly singing "Old Black Joe."
There's an old spinning wheel in the parlor,
Spinning dreams of the long, long ago.