If you look through recordings of country, western, and folk music ranging from the 1920s and 1930s through to present, you’ll notice a theme: songs about crime, murder, and executions are ever-present. From Grayson & Whittier’s recording of the centuries-old ballad “Rose Connelly” in 1927, to Lloyd Wilson’s “Stagger Lee”recorded in the 1950s, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”in the 1960s, to Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”in the 1990s, to Jason Isbell’s “Live Oak” or “Yvette”or Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham” in more recent years, songs about the murder are a staple of the American musical tradition. How did songs about violence and crime become so central? Today, we’ll take a closer look at the murder ballad tradition, tracing them back to the real crimes that inspired them but also considering what they might teach us about race, gender, and American culture.
You’re Bound to Die: The Long History of the American Murder Ballad
Researched and Written by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD
Recorded by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Marissa Rhodes, PhD
Sarah: When I was a kid, I was really into music – especially music from earlier generations. The radio in my room was a huge part of my life. Not only would I sit and listen to the oldies station for hours while I read or played, my radio had that amazing piece of technology of the 90s: a tape deck. Music became something that I bonded with my grandpa, Mike Foos, over. When he was younger, before arthritis made it impossible for him to play, my Grandpa Foos played the guitar and harmonica, and often entertained his friends and family with his renditions of country and western songs. So when I got interested in older music, Grandpa saw this as an opportunity to give me something of an education by providing me with a steady stream of mixtapes featuring a mix of country and western and folk music by artists like Johnny Cash and the comic singer-songwriter, Ray Stevens. But one song always stuck out to me: The Kingston Trio’s haunting folk song, “Tom Dooley.”
Marissa: The lyrics of “Tom Dooley”go like this:
I met her on the mountain/There I took her life/Met her on the mountain/Stabbed her with my knife/Hang down your head, Tom Dooley/Hang down your head and cry/Hang down your head, Tom Dooley/Poor boy, you’re bound to die
The song tells the story of a man named Tom Dooley who murdered a woman and who, as a consequence, must now hang from a ‘white oak tree.’ These dark lyrics, combined with the mournful harmonies, result in a song that’s at once lovely and fun to sing along with, but also strangely unsettling.
Sarah: And If you look through recordings of country, western, and folk music ranging from the 1920s and 1930s through to present, you’ll notice a theme: songs about crime, murder, and executions are ever-present. From Grayson & Whittier’s recording of the centuries-old ballad “Rose Connelly” in 1927, to Lloyd Wilson’s “Stagger Lee”recorded in the 1950s, Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”in the 1960s, to Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone”in the 1990s, to Jason Isbell’s “Live Oak” or “Yvette”or Zach Bryan’s “Birmingham” in more recent years, songs about the murder are a staple of the American musical tradition. How did songs about violence and crime become so central? Today, we’ll take a closer look at the murder ballad tradition, tracing them back to the real crimes that inspired them but also considering what they might teach us about race, gender, and American culture.
I’m Sarah
And I’m Marissa
And we are your historians for this episode of Dig
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Sarah: As always, we like to start by acknowledging the scholars who helped shape our work here on the podcast. This episode was a doozy to read and write because there is a huge and vibrant field of historians, musicologists, folklorists, musicians, and fans who have written about murder ballads. But I especially want to mention the British music journalist Paul Slade, who has done an enormous amount of work writing about not only the history of murder ballads, but the more recent history of who has performed and recorded them. His book on murder ballads is a must-read. I also used Cecil Brown’s amazing book Stagolee Shot Billy, John Foster West’s Lift Up Your Head, Tom Dula, Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus’s anthology, The Rose and Briar, plus many more folklorists and Appalachian scholars whose work I relied on. I tried to also link liberally throughout the copy, so you can read lyrics and listen to recordings yourself. I might also make a Spotify playlist …
Sarah: Ballads have existed for centuries, emerging in Europe sometime in the middle ages. Today, we often use the word ‘ballad’ as a shorthand for a love song, but musically speaking, the term ‘ballad’ at least initially referred to a song with a specific rhyme scheme and rhythm – ballads typically use quatrians (or 4 line stanzas) with ABCB or ABAB rhyme schemes. Medieval ballads also typically used an alternating structure of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter lines. “Iambic” refers to the stress placed on the syllables (dun DUN dun DUN dun DUN du DUN) and “tetrameter” means having eight syllabus, while “trimeter” means six syllables. Take for instance this quatrain from a version of the 16th century English ballad, “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet:” “The horse fair Ann et rode upon/He ambled like the wind/With silver he was shod before/with burning gold behind.” That rhythm has persisted in ballads for centuries – in fact, you can still hear that same pattern in the Kingston Trio’s recording of “Tom Dooley,” hundreds of years after Lord Thomas and Fair Annet: “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley/Hang down your head and cry/Hang down your head, Tom Dooley/Poor boy, you’re bound to die.” Hear it also in the Louvin Brothers famous recording of “The Knoxville Girl”: “She fell down on her bended knee/for mercy she did cry/ “Oh, Willy, dear, don’t kill me here/I’m unprepared to die!”
Marissa: Musically, ballads evolved out of the traditions of dance songs and narrative poems. The rhythm and format was influenced by traditional French and Danish carols and dancing songs – in fact, the word ‘ballad’ likely comes from the Latin word ‘ballare,’ or ‘to dance.’ In the Danish tradition, a singer would recite a narrative poem while accompanied by a fiddle in the middle of a ring of dancers. As time went on, these ‘dance poems’ became less common, instead evolving into two distinct things (dance songs and poetry). But simplified ballads, which were shorter and had standard formats and told compelling stories that appealled to mass audiences, had staying power. In terms of the actual narratives or subject matter in ballads, that likely was influenced by Germanic epics, the French chanson de geste, and the medieval chivalric romances. German epics are spoken poems that relay tales of heroes seeking honor and glory through some kind of adventure. (The most famous Germanic epic is Beowulf, which tells the tale of the heroic Beowulf who defeats the monster Grendel and also his monster mom.) The French chanson de geste is another medieval epic poem, typically sung or recited by entertainers and minstrels, that included some heroic elements but also aspects of realism about life at court or in the city. (The most famous chanson de geste is The Song of Roland – not the Dark Tower novel by Stephen King, but the poem about the war hero, Roland, during the reign of Charlemagne.) Chivalric romances, sometimes written in poetic form, are tales that told the story of heroic knights who wander about on quests, often in the service of a lovely and somewhat inaccessible woman, encountering fantastical things like dragons. Ballads took the storytelling tradition from those format, but simplified them and set them to music.
Sarah: Ballads were entertainment for the masses. According to scholar John Housman “the ballad public was not found in the great courts, but in smaller feudal castles and manor houses, and in the village communities dependent on them. Entertainment was supplied by the travelling minstrel, who moulded the long narratives of epic and romance, suitable only for leisurely circles, into the crisper and more economic form of the ballad narrative.” Ballads were fairly simple, easy to listen to and remember, and passed from performer to performer in an informal, communal system. Thus, says Housman, “ballads survived on the lips of the people, and though based on written sources, in course of time they became the property of the people who sang them, moving further and further away from their literary origins.” Ballads, then, are an oral tradition, one that can really only be understand and appreciated when heard or sung, rather than read.
Marissa: Because they were meant to be heard by a diverse population of listeners in the community, ballads came to deal with extreme emotions and events, which evoked a sense of empathy or understanding even across time or community. In other words, when a balladeer sang about the tragic and untimely death of a beautiful young woman at the hands of a dangerous and mean man, people could understand that scenario even if the actual inspiring event had been long since forgotten. Ballads typically were not religious, but especially in English and Scottish ballads, could have supernatural elements. Take, for instance, the traditional ballad “Tam Lin,” which dates back to at least the mid 16th century and recorded by the famous Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1769. The ballad tells the story of the elf-man Tam Lin, who is saved from the clutches of the Fairy Queen by a human lover named Janet. Another, “The Unquiet Grave,” which features the dead beginning to rise from their graves. Here’s one version of the lyrics:
How cold the wind do blow, dear love
And see the drops of rain!
I never had but one true-love
in the green wood he was slain.
I would do as much for my own true-love
As in my power doth lay
I would sit and mourn all on his grave
for twelvemonth and a day
A twelvemonth and a day being past
His ghost did rise and speak
What makes you mourn all on my grave?
For you will not let me sleep
It is not your gold I want, dear love
Nor yet your wealth I crave
But one kiss from your lily-white lips
Is all I wish to have
Your lips are as cold as clay, dear love,
Your breath doth smell so strong
I am afraid, my pretty, pretty maid
Your time will not be long.
Sarah: As both of those traditional Scottish and English ballads suggest, ballads also usually had a strong theme of love and romance – sometimes happy, and sometimes tragic. Take “The Gay Goshawk,” which tells the story of a young English woman who is in love with a Scottish man, who sends her letters using a goshawk to carry them. Her father refuses to let her go to him, so instead she makes her father promise that if she dies, he will bury her in Scotland – so she takes a sleeping potion to look like she’s dead. Her brothers take her to Scotland for her burial, and when her Scottish lover arrives to mourn her, she conveniently wakes up, asks for bread and wine because she’s really hungry, and sends her brothers home. Ballads also told the story of remarkable historical events that would excited public audiences, especially with scandalous stories about criminals, murderers, and public executions. The Scottish ballad “Mary Hamilton” tells the story of the execution of Mary Hamilton, a maid-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots, who was swindled by a lover and killed the resulting baby: “She’s tyed it in her apron/And she’d thrown it in the sea/Says, Sink ye, swim ye, bonny wee bab! You’ll neer get mair o me.” (It’s unclear what the historical inspiration was for this particular ballad, because while Mary Queen of Scots did have ladies in waiting named Mary, there’s no evidence for this particularly shocking event.) Another, “Johnie Armstrong,” is about a reiver (bandit) who rambled about committing crimes on the Scottish-English border in the 16th century. Johnnie was finally caught in 1530 by the English and executed: “John murdered was at Carlingrig/And all his galant companie/But Scotland’s heart was never sae wae/to see sae mony brave men die/Because they savd their country deir/From Englishmen; nane were saw bauld/whyle Johnie livd on the border-syde/Nane of them durst cum neir his hald.”
Marissa: Murder and mayhem have always been key features of ballads. Take “The Twa Sisters,” which dates back at least to the mid-17th century and was printed on a broadside in 1656. The song tells the tale of two sisters who go down to the seaside to watch their father’s ship come in. While standing there, the older sister throws the younger into the water and lets her drown, despite her piteous cries. The body of the younger sister then floats away, ending up in a mill-dam. There, the miller finds her lifeless body and … takes her body apart and turns her into an instrument. In one version, he turned her bones into a violin; in others, her beautiful yellow hair becomes the strings of a harp. Yikes. “Edward” is a ballad that likely emerged in the mid 17th century. In this one, a mother asks her son Davie why there is blood on his sword or hunting knife. He claims its the blood of a hawk, then a dog or horse, then finally admits that he has killed someone – in some versions, his brother, in others, his father. “Babylon,” or “The Bonnie Banks o Fordie,” is about an outlaw who meets three young women in the woods. He asks each one to either agree to marry him or die by his knife – the first two sisters refuse to marry him and thus are killed. The third one also refuses to marry him, but also refuses to be killed. (Apparently the first two didn’t see this as an option?) Here’s what happens next: “I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife/For I hae a brother in this wood/A gin ye kill me, it he’ll kill thee.” The robber asks what her brother’s name is, and suddenly realizes that the girls were HIS OWN SISTERS! (Insert dramatic groundhog gif.) Then, of course, the outlaw takes his own life with his knife, sparing the final sister. (Interestingly enough, both “Edward” and “Babylon” were also commonly sung around Scandanavia!)
Sarah: With the invention of printing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ballads became not just an oral (or sung/performed) tradition, but a written one as well. Scholars Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini suggest that printed ballads were “by far the most printed medium in the literary marketplace of London.”[1] There is something of a split in the study of ballads today over printed vs. sung/performed/oral tradition ballads. While musicologists and folklorists concentrate on the sung ballads, literary scholars, art historians, and historians have concentrated on print ballads. Some scholars of the sung ballads see them as wholly distinct from print ballads, while others see them as interconnected traditions. But still, the popularity of ballads that told chilling stories of murder, especially those that dealt with the violent death of a beautiful young woman at the hands of a lover, remained hugely popular. I found one digitized by University of Manchester called “The Gosport Tragedy ,” which is just one version of a song that has probably dozens of iterations. The printed lyrics are quite long – 16 stanzas instead of most earlier ballads, which tend to be only 8, 10, or 12 stanzas or thereabouts. “The Gosport Tragedy” is about a young couple named William and Molly. William is trying to convince Molly to marry him – mostly, it seems, so she will sleep with him. Molly replies that she doesn’t trust men, who have a tendency to betray their promises to young women after they get sex. Finally, he wears her down and she sleeps with him, and, of course, immediately gets pregnant. William, a ship’s carpenter, is about to go off to sea, but promises they will wed before he leaves. But when William meets her early in the morning before their wedding, he tells her he must take her through the woods to meet a friend. Molly sees through this facade: “At length this maiden began for to weep/saying William, I fancy thou lead’st me astray/On purpose my innocent life to betray.” William’s reply is chilling: “He said, ‘that is true and none can you save/for I all this night have been digging you grave.” She begs for her and her unborn child’s life, but he refuses. “He said, there’s no time disputing to stand/so instantly taking the knife in his hand/he pierced her body til blood it did flow/then into the grave her body did throw.” (Happily, the ghost of the murdered girl then haunts her killer until he is driven mad, confesses his crime, and dies.) “The Gosport Tragedy” has numerous later versions, and its central theme – a man killing a beautiful young woman who he either has already had sex with and impregnated, or who he wants to have sex with and but who has rejected him, appear over and over.
Marissa: Despite their romantic or murderous content and general popularity, which might associate them with ‘low culture,’ English and Scottish ballads have long been understood as a unique and important artifact of those cultures. While folks had worked on collecting and documenting ballads and their many variations since probably the mid-18th century, the most significant collection was undertaken by Francis James Child, who was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, then later the first ever Professor of English, at Harvard University in the last half of the 19th century. In the 1850s, Child began work on what would later be understood as his masterwork: English and Scottish Ballads, in eight volumes. What drew Child to the ballads was precisely the difference between oral/sung ballads and written ones. The switch from oral to printed English led Child to become, in the words of folklorist David Bynum, “inevitably drawn to pondering the essential differences between speech and writing, and to searching for the origins of thoughtful expression in English.”[2] The result was a collection of 350 ballads that quickly became some thing of a ‘canon’ of English and Scottish ballads. To this day, when you look up information about a particular ballad, it comes with a series of identification numbers. For instance, “Tam Lin” is Child 39 – the 39th ballad in Child’s collection, while “Mary Hamilton” is Child 173. (As an aside, many traditional ballads also have another number – for instance, “Tam Lin” is Child 39 but also Roud 35, which refers to the much larger and more modern Folk Song Index developed by folklorist Steve Roud.)
Sarah: With the careful documentation of the 350 canonical “Child ballads,” Child set of something of a trend in “ballad hunting” in the United States, as folklorists and ethnographers went out to search for evidence of Child’s canonical songs in the American popular musical tradition. Focus quickly centered on the Appalachian region, which quickly became the center of folklife and folk music research during the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. For instance, when University of Missouri professor Harry Belden was overseeing a English Club event in which students read aloud their own stories, a student included a song in a story that she claimed was something she had learned at home in the rural Ozarks – but which Belden recognized immediately as a Child ballad. The student didn’t know what a Child ballad was, but knew the song from growing up singing it and others with her community. Inspired by Child’s work documenting English and Scottish ballads and cementing their place in defining British and Scottish culture, ‘ballad-hunters’ and ‘song-catchers’ like Belden went out to find out how those ballads had made a home in America.
Marissa: At the same time, geologists and geographers were developing theories about ‘region,’ which scholars like John Wesley Powell used to refer to “a territory whose human institutions and outlooks were derived from the environmental features that set the territory apart from other regions.”[3] In other words, there was a growing belief that environment and humans interacted to develop unique cultures. The result was the development of a kind of mashup of geography and anthropology, which looked at the interactions between geography and human cultures. Again, Appalachia stood out as one such unique region that drew academic interest. For instance, the geographer Ellen Churchill Semple wrote an essay in 1901 that first suggested that it was the topography of Appalachia that created a unique experience of “isolation and poverty” which held cultural development back from progress.[4] (A very 1901 essay, indeed.) But Appalachian ballad hunters meant something specific when they said that the landscape “held the culture back” – in this case, the existence of Child ballads in the culture of Appalachia and its rural surrounds like the further-west Ozarks was evidence of an ethnically pure, Anglo-Saxon Protestant race. For some folklorists and ballad-hunters, ballads were proof of a kind of ur-American of English origins, untouched by the pernicious effects of cultural diffusion or religious diversity. One of the most famous ballad-hunters, the Englishman Cecil Sharp, saw ballads as proof that Appalachians were inherently English: “Although the people are so English they have their American quality …. in that they are freer than the English peasant….They have their own land and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of that servility which unhappily is one of the characterizations of the English peasant.”[5] Unlike Semple, Sharp saw Appalachian culture as not being slow to develop, but rather immune to negative change: “A case of arrested development? I should prefer to call it a case of arrested degeneration.”[6] In other words, from an Englishman’s perspective, the ballads were evidence of an old-time English culture untouched by time.
Marissa: Ballad-hunters were especially tied to the belief that Appalachia had been settled almost entirely by Protestant English and Scots-Irish immigrants. There is truth to that – in the mid-18th century, there was a significant influx of Protestant English and Scottish immigration to places like North Carolina and it is likely how the Child ballads arrived in Appalachia in the first place. But in focusing on those canonical ballads, ballad-catchers were reinforcing a version of Appalachian culture that wasn’t entirely accurate, and which reflected their own beliefs that ethnic purity and ‘true American-ness’. Robert Winslow Gordon, a Harvard trained ballad-hunter that worked in Appalachia, saw ballads as evidence of the true American past: “Personally, I frankly believe that the whole project of reviving and making known our true American folk stuff is one of the most worthwhile things to be done today. From the point of view of true Americanism. That stuff is the very soul of our past, of pioneers, of the men who made America. It’s not modern Hebrew Broadway jazz.”[7] This of course was also a white and Protestant Christian culture, as far as scholars were concerned. John C. Campbell, who deeply researched life in Appalachia, downplayed the African American presence in the region and suggested that it was, if not culturally irrelevant, a negative influence limited to cities. In their search for authentic and ‘pure’ ballads, song-catcheres outright ignored songs that weren’t British or Scottish in origin, even if they were musically or thematically similar. For instance, Sharp encountered but did not document American ballads like “Tom Dooley”even though they were extremely similar to Child ballads because they were American in origin, and thus inferior. Songs that suggested Black, German, or Irish musical influence were especially bad. He was seeking ethnically pure, English ballads only. As John Williams writes, “Sharp traveled the railroads of the Upper South oblivious to the African American blues and banjo and gospel music that must have been all around him, suffering no epiphanies such as the one that had started his collecting career many years before, when he chanced to hear a gardener singing while at work on the greenery of an English country parsonage.” When he encountered non-white Appalachians, he treated them like anomalies, rather than true Appalachians.
Sarah: Another really interesting example of this, I think, is the case of the ballad “Rose Connolly.” Ballad hunters like Cecil Sharp were seeking, specifically, English and Scottish songs, and rejected all others. One such song was “Rose Connolly,” also called “Down in the Willow Garden.” This bloody little song tells the tale of a man so desperate to kill his lover that he poisons, stabs, and finally drowns her: “I drew a saber thru her/Which were a bloody knife/I threw her into th’ river/Which were a dreadful sight/My Father always had told me/That money would set me free/If I would murder that pretty little Miss/Whose name was Rose Connelly.” The song is Irish – not British or Scottish – and likely emerged around 1811. It seems to be interwoven with “The Wexford Girl,” which is the Irish version of a English murder ballad that we’ll talk about in a few minutes. Cecil Sharp encountered “Rose Connolly” in Appalachia in 1918, once in Virginia, and again in North Carolina. Sharp had already published one collection of ballads at this point, and found this particular trip to the mountains disappointing, finding nothing that fit his interests – even though he “found” Rose Connolly and could have snatched it up like he did others. The song had been identified before, and was clearly very popular and embedded in the culture, and was being sung all around the region – so it was culturally relevant in Appalachia. And yet, Sharp never published “Rose Connolly” in any of his collections, which contained over nearly 400 songs. While Sharp didn’t write much about his feelings about Irish culture, he was of a generation of white English men who believed that the Irish was a distinct race, different and apart from the English. And in his work, he differentiated “Celtic” and “English” songs, considering English variations more sophisticated and real, while Irish versions were immature and less developed.
Marissa: For instance, Sharp wrote, “The Celt will in all probability, be attracted by those variations [of ballads] which are primarily sensuous, and which satisfy his somewhat ornate feeling for beauty; whilst in the case of the Anglo-Saxon those variations which make for self-expression will be given the preference.”[8] After one encounter with a ballad-singer in North Carolina in 1916, Sharp noted his annoyance with the man who sat while he played, rested his fiddle on his knee, and improvised whenever so moved. Sharp later wrote that he was “a bad singer and a very difficult fiddler to note from …. His mother was a Franklin. He must have Irish blood in him.”[9] When he attended a fiddling contest in Knoxville, Tennessee, Sharp heard a man named Mr. Julian fiddle. He recorded that Julian’s tunes were “nice” but was ultimately not all that interested. Sharp wrote: “He said he was an Irishman and he undoubtedly was …. I questioned him about his name, which he said used to be Julian, No doubt it was originally Doolan.” Not only were the Irishman’s tunes not compelling, but Sharp doubted that Julian was the original spelling of his name – that sounded too English. Sharp also had difficulty when it came to Highland Scots, who he also felt weren’t Anglo-Saxon but rather Gaelic. He summed up his feeling on all non-English speaking cultures when it came to ballads, in 1917, writing: “The Appalachian tunes, notwithstanding their “gapped” characteristics, have far more affinity with the normal English folk-tune than with that of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander… and may, therefore, very well have been derived from those who, dwelling on the borders of the Highland Kingdom, had become infected to some extent with the musical proclivities of their neighbors … For folklorists will, I think, agree, England and the English-speaking parts of Scotland must … be regarded as one homogenous area.” So in other words, while there might be Celtic or Gaelic influences on English ballads, those were merely evidence of infection. The real ballads come from the areas of England and the Scottish-English border where English was natively spoken.
Sarah: As a fun little aside, the rise of square dancing as a requirement in schools is directly connected to this period of interest in ballads and folklorists’ and ethnologists’ racist theory that Appalachia was a bastian of Anglo-Saxon Americans. Henry Ford, innovator of the American motor vehicle industry, was famously extremely anti-Semitic. In his view, modern music was dangerously influenced by Jewish performers and producers. Like Semple, Ford also thought “Broadway jazz” was too Black and too Jewish. Content warning, this is a gross quote from Ford’s newspaper, grotesquely named The International Jew: “Many people have wondered where come the waves upon waves of musical slush taht invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.” (The rest of the article gets even more racist and antisemitic; I’ll spare you that.) Ford believed that Jews were in a bid for total social control of the world – they were globalists, to use a term that is often used in modern discourse as a anti-Semitic dogwhistle. Jazz and the modern dancing that went with it were tools that this global Jewish conspiracy used to control the masses and degenerate cultures. It was especially enticing to Black Americans, who he believed were more vulnerable to such attempts at social control.
Sarah: Old fashioned folk dancing, especially square dancing, on the other hand, was safely Anglo-Saxon, Christian, and American. Ford put tons of energy into pushing square dancing, funding country music radio shows and even requiring that his employees attend dances. Through the twentieth century, the push to establish folk and country music as the ‘real’ music of American culture, and square dancing the highest and most culturally pure form of dance, only strengthened. Individual states and localities adding square dancing to their physical education curriculums, and there were repeated attempts to declare square dancing the official dance of the country or individual states. And in 1982, West Virginia senator Robert Byrd was successful in passing a temporary resolution that delared square dancing the official folk dance of the United States. The bill declared that “square dancing is a joyfu expression of the vibrant spirit of the people of the United States” that demonstrates “etiquette among men and women,” and that it was a “traditional form of family recreation which symbolizes a basic strength in this country, namely, the unity of the family.” And there was something very similar at work in the UK, where the ballad-hunter Cecil Sharp helped to revive traditional Morris dancing, which was likewise understood as culturally important and inherently British.
Marissa: But the reality was that by the 1920s and 1930s, as Appalachian music escaped from the mountains and became nationally popular as ‘country’ and ‘folk,’ while it was still very much informed by the British and Scottish ballads of yore, it was also shaped by a wide range of American instruments, new and old songs, and styles borrowed from Black performers. Most of Appalachia was also not as cut off and isolated as ballad-catchers liked to suggest – especially with the introduction of the railroad, most Appalachians consumed national cultural products, national news, and took part in national trends. An example that John Williams gives of that is a song performed by a itinerant preacher and performer in the 1920s decrying women who wore bobs and pants. If Appalachia was so cut off from the rest of American society, how did they know to criticize the urban culture and social trends of the 1920s?[10] Traditional ballads remained a standard, but were supplemented by fiddle tunes, religious music and hymns, and what might be called like, pop music – sheet music that was nationally printed and cheap to buy.
Sarah: Ballad catchers in Appalachia were particularly interested in American ballads that had derived from Scottish and British ballads. One particularly meaningful one was “The Gosport Tragedy” that we described before, in which the ship’s carpenter lures his pregnant lover into the woods to murder her. ( I hope you’re noticing a theme here: most, though not all, murder ballads feature the murder of a beautiful young woman at the hands of a man.) “The Gosport Tragedy” has been traced to numerous other ballads with the same themes and often the same wording but with slightly different names in Great Britain, such as “The Berkshire Tragedy,” “The Oxford Tragedy,” and “The Bloody Miller,” among others. But unlike some of the older British ballads which told grim stories of murder and mayhem that were likely disconnected, at least by time, from any real origin stories, these can be traced to at least some real life historical inspiration. In 1683, a clergyman named Philip Henry wrote the following in his diary: “I heard of a murther in Salop on Sabb. Day ye 10 instant, a woman fathering a conception on a Milner was Kild by him in a feild, her Body laye there many dates by reason of ye Coroner’s absence.”[11] Around the same time, the famed English diarist Samuel Pepys was collecting printed ballads, and created a library including around 1800 broadsides. One of them, “The Bloody Miller,” collected sometime between 1666 and 1688, included this preface: “A true and just account of one Francis Cooper of Hocstow near Shrewsbury, who was a Miller’s Servant and kept company with one Anne Nichols for the space of two years, who then proved to be with Child by him and being urged by her Father to marry her he most wickedly and barbarously murdered her.”[12] Modern research conducted by the music historian Paul Slade shows that these two notations are referring to a very real crime that inspired the ballads: the murder of Anne Nichols by her lover, Francis Cooper, likely in 1683. Records suggest that in the real case, Anne and Francis’s child was born before Anne was murdered, and was baptised Ichabod on March 24, a few weeks after his mother’s burial. (Paul Slade makes the very interesting point that the name Ichabod is Biblical, coming from 1 Samuel, the child of the sexual sinner Phinehas. Ichabod is born after his mother learns of Phinehas’s smiting in battle, and then she promptly dies herself.) There are no records that give us insight into Francis Cooper’s fate, though he is listed in Ichabod’s baptismal record as a “homicide,” indicating his guilt. He was likely executed, but no legal or burial records are extant to prove that definitively.
Marissa: “The Bloody Miller” is about a miller rather than a ship’s carpenter, but the storyline is very similar: the two court for a long period of time, but he is reluctant to marry her. When she becomes pregnant, she asks that they get married, but instead, he lures her to a remote place (a meadow rather than the woods) where he kills her. It’s likely that “The Bloody Miller” came first, then morphed over time into the “The Gosport Tragedy” and “The Berkshire Tragedy.” Once it arrived in the US, these ballads morphed again at least twice, into two songs that became staples among Appalachian balladry and, later, in folk and country music: “The Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly.” It’s not clear which version arrived first, but Paul Slade connects it to a version of “The Bloody Miller” and “The Berkshire Tragedy” called “The Oxford Tragedy,” which claims a specific origin for the murdered girl in the city of Oxford. In the US, where Oxford was less relevant, the location changed, first to Lexington, in an early 19th century version called “The Lexington Miller,” where the exact same story follows, just set in Lexington, Kentucky. He also connects the “X” sound in the location to different versions of the song: Berkshire (pronounced “Barxshire”), Oxford, Wexford, Lexington, then finally to Knoxville. But not only did the location change, but the “origin” story as well. While the “Bloody Miller” could be traced all the way back to at least the late 17th century in the Pepys collection, Americans used that very old murder as a kind of scaffolding to hold a more recent, American murder. In 1892, a young woman named Mary Lula Noel was staying with her sister and brother-in-law in Pineville, Missouri when she was visited by a young man named William Simmons. When her sister and brother-in-law left to go back to their parents’ home in nearby Joplin, Mary opted to stay with William for a few days, then travel with him from Pineville to Joplin to meet up with them. But instead of arriving, Mary was not seen again until her body was discovered in the Elk River, her body badly bruised. Footprints suggested that the couple had walked along the banks of the river before she was beaten and dumped in the water. Not long after, William Simmons was arrested and tried, and after a messy trial, he was sentenced to only ten years in prison.
Sarah: This story isn’t exactly like the one found in those earlier ballads – for instance, we don’t have clear evidence that Mary was pregnant, or that the two were in a pre-existing relationship, or that the issue of marriage was a point of contention between them. But the murder of a beautiful young woman in a isolated, rural place fit into the frame provided by the pre-existing ballad. Some versions turn “The Knoxville Girl” into “The Noel Girl,” referencing Mary Lula Noel’s last name, and working the town of Pineville into the lyrics instead of Knoxville. For instance, a ballad recorded by ballad-hunter Vance Randolph in Missouri is virtually the same as “The Knoxville Girl.” Here’s “The Noel Girl” version: “Twas in the city of Pineville/I owned a floury mill/Twas in the city of Pineville/I used to live and dwell.” And here’s “The Knoxville Girl”: “I met a little girl in Knoxville/a town we all know well/And every Sunday evening/out in her home, I’d dwell.” So you can see the influence of “The Bloody Miller,” (we don’t know whether William Simmons was a miller, for instance) as well as the Americanized “Knoxville Girl.” Another feature of “The Knoxville Girl” that persists across centuries is a lie that the murderer tells to explain away the blood on his clothes: “I told my anxious mother I was bleeding at my nose.” Various versions of ballad include this detail, which folklorists connect to a common literary trope in British culture used to foreshadow something ominous dating back in stories and diaries to at least the year 1180.[13] In my mind, this is also spooky given one of the most famous recordings of “The Knoxville Girl,” which came out in 1956. The Louvin Brothers were famous for their eerie harmonies, which scholars of country music call “blood harmony,” which is the idea that some siblings have the almost supernatural ability to harmonize closely and switch parts intuitively based on their shared blood. Add to that their own bloody history – the Louvins’ father was a violent drunk, and Ira Louvin grew up to be the same. In 1963, Ira tried to kill his wife by wrapping a telephone cord around her neck. To save her own life, Faye shot Ira 4 times with a .22. Ira survived, only to bleed to death in a car accident just two years later when another drunk hit his car in 1965. The song and its ominous nosebleed are connected, then, to the spooky beauty of the Louvin Brothers ‘blood harmony,’ Ira’s abusive actions, and his own violent death.
Marissa: So, as you can see in the history of “The Knoxville Girl,” the murder ballad that is well known today among folk and country music connoisseurs is actually the product of a long and circuitous history of real life murders, folk tales, common tropes, and the evolving, shared, oral tradition of balladry, passed from performer to performer on both sides of the Atlantic. But many ballads that are now closely associated with the genre of American murder ballads are (relatively speaking, anyway!) pretty new. An example is that Kingston Trio song, “Tom Dooley.” The song is really pretty basic in its detail – we only know that Tom Dooley is fated to hang, that he has murdered a young woman with a knife, and that he was betrayed by someone named “Grayson.” The song was a massive hit – selling 6 million records – when the Kingston Trio (Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds) released it in the midst of the mid-20th century folk revival.[14] This period featured artists like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Mississippi John Hurt, Huddie Leadbetter (nicknamed “Lead Belly”) and others reintroducing traditional American music, performing old ballads, folk songs, and labor music. (This was also connected to the renewed interest in square dancing kicked off by Henry Ford, but these folks tended to be old school lefties who had very different ideas about the meanings behind traditional music!) “Tom Dooley” was such a huge commercial hit that it led to a bit of a resurgence in the old murder ballad, inspiring others to record old murder ballads and write new ones.
Sarah: As music historian Paul Slade notes, before the Kingston Trio recorded “Tom Dooley,” no one outside of North Carolina had ever heard of Tom Dooley.[15] The ballad was almost hyper-local, telling the story of a very real crime that took place in mountainous western North Carolina. A man named Tom Dula – pronounced Dooley in the local dialect, was born in Elkville, North Carolina in 1844. Dula had a longstanding relationship with a married neighbor, Ann Foster Melton. Ann Melton was beautiful and headstrong and her husband didn’t seem to mind her relationship with Dula. Dula enlisted in Conefderate army in 1862, and in 1865, was taken prisoner and placed in a federal prison camp. It was here that his name was first recorded as “Dooley,” when government paperwork tried to render the phonetic pronunciation of his last name. When he finally returned home, poverty and wartime destruction had made life in western North Carolina difficult, leaving most residents to scratch out a living as tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Tom started sleeping with the daughter of one such sharecropper, Laura Foster, but also maintained his long-standing sexual relationship with Anne Melton. Also in the mix was a housekeeper in the next county over, Ann’s cousin Pauline. This was likely amidst a network of sexual relationships people in the town were having with one another, married and unmarried. The result was not super surprising: the crew shared syphilis with each other, likely contracted from Pauline, who had taken the housekeeping job so she could maintain the medicine she took to treat her infection. Tom must have contracted the disease from Pauline, then shared it with both Ann and Laura. This … led to some drama.
Marissa: It seems that Tom ranted and raved around Elkville that he wanted to kill the person who gave him the infection. So, too, did Ann. They both seemed to place the blame on Laura, who was the least connected to the community and the newest in town. (Though Pauline was also newish in town, she had kinship ties to Ann and her family.) At one point, Tom and Laura seem to have been discussing marriage, leading to speculation that she may have been pregnant. In late May, 1866, Tom borrowed a mattock – a heavy tool for digging – from Ann’s mother, and was seen swinging it just off a path near his family’s cabin. Then, Ann and Tom met at her mother’s house and left together with a full canteen of moonshine. The next day, Tom met with Laura, asking her to meet him in the woods. Laura was seen taking her father’s horse to ride the six miles into the woods to the meeting place – and never seen alive again. Tom, on the other hand, was seen whispering insistently to Ann later that night, then seen by his mother at home in bed. Meanwhile, Laura’s father was worried about his missing mare – only to find that the horse suddenly turned up again, with its lead rope gnawed through, as if it had chewed or pulled itself free from being tied up somewhere. Suspicion grew as days turned into weeks and Laura did not return. At first, people speculated that Ann had killed Laura, but it soon turned to Tom, and in late June, the community was clamoring for Tom’s arrest. At the place where Laura had told others she was planning to meet Tom that night, a search turned up horse manure and what looked like a pool of blood.
Sarah: Tom and Ann seemed nervous, too. Tom showed up at the Melton’s house to retrieve a knife he’d left there, explaining that he was afraid he was going to be accused of causing Laura’s disappearance, so he had to get outta town. He had good timing, because just as he made it out of the county, the town justice of the peace issued a warrant for his arrest. Tom was already on his way to Tennessee, though, where he went by the name Tom Hall and found work at the farm of a former Confederate officer named James Grayson. When he’d made some cash, he moved on again, walking west. Two deputies from Elkville, trying to execute the warrant, traced Tom to Grayson’s farm and asked the former officer for his help in tracking down the fugitive. With his assistance and local influence, the three men successful located Tom in Mountain City, about fifty miles from Elkville. Meanwhile, Ann confided in Pauline that she was concerned that more evidence against Tom would be found – especially because she worried that he had buried Laura hastily and that the grave would be uncovered. She needed Pauline’s help to rebury the girl. After following Ann most of the way to the spot where she said Laura was buried, Pauline freaked out, refused to go any further, and ran home. She started drinking heavily and acting out, even causing a scene when questioned by the deputies, shouting, “Yes, I and Dula killed her and I ran away! Come out, Tom Dula, let us kill some more!” The deputies didn’t believe Pauline actually had killed Laura, but did believe that she knew who had. To get her to talk, they locked her up in the jail and told her that she was going to be tried to Laura’s death, and pretty quickly, this did the trick. She cracked, and told the deputies that she knew where the body was buried, leading them up onto the ridge where Ann had led her to rebury the body. There, a search party of local men found Laura Foster’s body, in a short and shallow grave close to where Tom Dula had been spotted digging just off the path. Laura had been stabbed in the ribs.
Marissa: In short order – before the trial even – the first ballad about Laura Foster’s murder appeared in the form of a poem called “The Murder of Laura Foster” by local writer named Thomas Land. The poem was a little more in nineteenth century, ornate style than a ballad, but the poem established that Laura was murdered by “a groom,” or a lover she hoped to marry. It does not name the murderer or include any real specifics about the crime. And Laura is turned into a sweet, innocent girl: “Her youthful heart no sorrow knew/She fancied all mankind were true/and thus she gailey passed along/humming at times a favorite song.” Local readers would likely know this wasn’t a super accurate depiction of Laura, but it didn’t really matter – it helped the story fit into the narratives that were familiar from sentimental literature and ballads. This poem even ends with a hopeful Christian image: “Then in a churchyard her they lay/no more to rise til Judgement Day/Then, robed in white, we trust she’ll rise/to meet her Saviour in the skies.”[16] Ann and Tom’s trial commenced on October 1, 1866. Somehow – and no one is sure how – Tom managed to get the very famous former governor of North Carolina, Zebulon Vance, to serve as his attorney. Vance tried to make the argument that there was no way that the two could get a fair trial because emotions were so high and there was so much public opinion against the two. The court agreed, and the trial was moved. Then, Vance argued that the trials should happen separately – and again, the court agreed. When the trial finally started, the prosecution argued that Tom had contracted syphilis from Laura and subsequently given it to Ann, and in his anger, he took revenge on Laura. Vance worked hard to present Dula as a brave former soldier who had been seduced into a relationship by a calculating Laura. But despite all his hard work, Tom Dula was swiftly found guilty. (Side note: it’s wild that we have this much detail of a 19th century court case, which did not always have careful note-taking. In fact, there wasn’t even a stenographer at the original trial. But Tom’s attorneys worked to get him a retrial, which meant that they needed careful documentation of the original trial – which remains the most detailed documentation that we have of the case!)
Sarah: At this point, the story, complete with more identifying details, began to appear in local ballads. We only really know about them in retrospect, because they weren’t recorded or studied until the era of ballad-hunting. In the 1940s, three versions of the ballad were recorded in North Carolina which were described as “very popular in the hills of Wilkes, Alexander, and Caldwell counties in 1867.” (Those counties were were Dula and the whole crew lived and where the crime took place.) The woman who collected the songs for recording also wrote that the song continued to be popular among ‘mountain ballad singers,’ and that the original song had been written by a Black man named Charlie Davenport to the tune of a song that had been sung traditionally by enslaved people. The lyrics that were recorded f are extremely similar to the one recorded by the Kingston Trio: “Hang down your head, Tom Dula/Hang down your head and cry/You killed poor Laura Foster/and now you’re bound to die.”[17] As those ballads were being composed and sung in 1867, the case was still not settled, as the retrial dragged on. But many of the the witnesses called to testify a second time failed to show up – including Colonel Grayson. Under growing pressure, the judge refused to continue to issue continuances to wait for the recalcitrant witnesses, and finally issued a hard deadline for a new trial. Without the witnesses, the case was retried, but came to the same result: Tom Dula must hang.
Marissa: The hanging, held on May 1, 1868, was a spectacle. Because the trials had dragged on so long and had been so heavily reported on, a massive crowd gathered at the gallows in a field to watch Tom Dula die. Despite the ballads evocative “white oak tree,” it was a constructed gallows, not a tree that was used for execution. In his final hours, Tom Dula issued a confession, stating simply that he, and no one else, had killed Laura Foster. Just before 1 pm, Tom Dula was brought out in a cart and rolled through the street. According to popular mythology, Tom Dula was singing his own ballad – which he composed for the occasion – while he was rolled along toward the gallows, but this seems extremely unlikely and doesn’t appear in contemporar newspaper reports. Apparently, what Dula actually did do was give an extremely long speech, railing against those who he claimed lied to convict him and even pontificating on the Confederate cause. According to one account, an old man yelled from the crowd, “Oh, Tom Dula, hang down your head and cry. Because you killed poor Laura Foster and now you must die.” Paul Slade writes that it seems unlikely these were the actual words a person shouting from the crowd used, but it is interesting nonetheless, since it helps to confirm that that version of the ballad using that exact line was already circulating. Then, finally, Dula was hung. Ann’s trial came not long after Tom’s death, but was quickly dismissed. She wasn’t being charged with the murder, but of accessory because she (according to the prosecution) pushed Tom to kill Laura Foster. But while Ann was released and not executed, she didn’t live much longer, and died of illness in 1875.
Sarah: The song remained mostly only locally known and sung. During the heyday of ballad-catching, the song almost certainly was being sung around the mountainous, Appalachian region of western North Carolina, but they largely ignored it because it was not the Anglo-Saxon ballads they were after – it was recent, American and salacious. Instead, it remained a favorite of folks in the area, passed down through families. Two performers, Doc Watson (one of my grandpa’s favorites) and Frank Proffit, both learned the song from their grandmothers in the region as kids. Proffitt, who made a living in rural Appalachia farming and repairing musical instruments, is largely responsible for the ballad of Tom Dula becoming probably the most well-known murder ballad today. Frank Proffit’s granny, Adeline Perdue, was in the crowd when Tom Dula’s cart rolled on toward his execution. She told her little grandson all about how Tom had been singing his own ballad while on his way to meet his fate. In 1937, a man named Frank Warner, visiting the area from New York stopped to buy a dulcimer from Proffitt, and as they were chatting, asked Profitt to sing him some old time songs from the region. Warner was enamored, and about a year later, returned to Profitt’s farm with an extremely rudimentary tape recorder. It was then that Profitt was recorded singing “Tom Dula.” Warner later gave his collection of Appalachian ballads to the ethnomusicologist and ballad catcher, Alan Lomax, who published it, arranged for piano and voice, in his 1946 book, Folk Song USA. A few years later, the three men of the Kingston Trio overheard someone sing it at an audition in San Francisco, and loved it. They looked it up in Lomax’s book and put the song into their regular performance lineup. Imagine Frank Proffit’s surprise when he heard his granny’s song on the radio in the late 1950s – and eventually, in a case settled out of court, Profitt was able to arrange to share the songwriting credit and subsequent royalties with Warner and Lomax’s family.[18]
Marissa: “Tom Dooley” was largely unknown until the Kingston Trio made it popular; now most iterations of the song are derived from their interpretation. But other more modern American murder ballads took on a life of their own immediately, spreading and inspiring dozens of variations across differen genres of music. One such example is what is typically named “Stagger Lee” but sometimes “Stagolee” or “Stack O’Lee.” While it is a folk song about a real murder, everything else about it defies the patterns set by the traditional murder ballad identified by folks like Francis Child and Cecil Sharp. It’s largely a song of the 20th century, with its earliest versions dating back to 1903. It’s a song that originated outside of the heart of Appalachia, in St. Louis, Missouri. And it’s a very Black song, telling the story of the murder of a Black man at the hands of another Black man, in the midst of a very distinctive moment in African-American culture. It’s also very widely recorded, with around 400 versions performed and recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley to The Grateful Dead to The Clash and Amy Winehouse.[19] The story goes like this. In the winter of 1895, a man named Billy Lyons walked into Bill Curtis’s saloon in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis was a unique place at the close of the 19th century. It was the center of riverboat culture, where folks working and traveling on the river came in and out of the city, frequenting bars, dancing to ragtime music, and buying and selling sex. Curtis’s saloon was in a particularly rough part of St. Louis, a neighborhood called Deep Morgan, which was full of rowdy bars, loud music joints, brothels, and cheap places to get drunk. Nearby Curtis’s was Bridgewater’s, another notorious bar. The two joints had a deeply antagonistic relationship – Curtis’s hosted white Democrats, while Henry Bridgewater was a well-known Black Republican. Folks who frequented the bars treated them like rival headquarters. Bill Lyons, in fact, had gotten into trouble at Curtis’s before, when he brandished a knife at Bill Curtis, until a police officer arrived and arrested him. But in 1895, here was Bill Lyons again, walking into Bill Curtis’s. As he walked in, Bill Lyons turned to his pal, Henry Crump, and asked to borrow a knife, explaining that every time he went into that place, it seemed he had to defend himself.
Sarah: Just after Lyons walked in, Lee Shelton arrived. Shelton, who was nicknamed Stack Lee, sometimes worked as a bar tender at Curtis’s, sometimes worked as a carriage driver, and sometimes helped run an illegal gambling and sex work operation. Stack Lee was, at least according to most accounts, was handsome and well-dressed, wearing the latest fashions. He was what was nicknamed in St. Louis a “mack,” or macquereaux … essentially, a pimp. He wore shining boots with mirrored toes called “St. Louis flats,” which acted like little disco balls sending little bits of light everywhere. He wore spats, striped gray pants, a black coat, distinctive patterned red vest, and yellow shirt with a high standing collar. To top it off, he wore a white bowler-style Stetson hat – the absolute height of style.[20] Shelton swaggered into Curtis’s and exclaimed, “Who’s treating?” Someone pointed to Billy Lyons, so Shelton made his way over to him, and the two joked around while drinking for a little while. But after a few drinks, the conversation grew combative, and Lyons angrily wacked at Stack Lee Shelton’s hat. The argument was likely more complicated than just two drunk dudes beefing – the two was enmeshed in the rival politics of the Deep Morgan neighborhood, with Lyons a Republican and Stack Lee working for white Democrats. This slight was simply not acceptable, and Shelton demanded that Lyons pay him for the damage he had done to his Stetson hat. When Lyons refused, Shelton informed him he would shoot him – when Lyons still didn’t hand over the cash, Shelton started to hit Lyons with the butt of the gun. Then, Lyons reached for that knife he borrowed from his friend Crump, and said to Shelton, “You cock-eyed son of a bitch, I’m going to make you kill me.”[21] Shelton was happy to oblige, aimed, and in front of more than twenty witnesses inside the saloon, pulled the trigger.
Marissa: Bill Lyons was taken out to a nearby hospital, where he died a few hours later. Stack Lee Shelton, on the other hand, coolly walked out and went home, gave his landlady his gun, and went to bed. That was where he was arrested in the wee hours of the morning. Angry crowds, described by the press as “the Henry Bridgewater faction,” showed up to taunt Stack Lee as he was brought to the court house. Within days, Shelton had hired a well-known lawyer, Nat Dryden. This added another level of interest to the already flashy case – Dryden was well-known, extremely flamboyant, addicted to both alcohol and opium, and was locally known for recently securing a conviction for a white man who murdered a black man – not something that was a given in the late 19th century. Dryden helped get Shelton out on bail while he awaited trial in July 1896. The trial added another layer of drama to the case. Dryden made a self-defense argument that must have worked to some extent, because the jury hung and was unable to come to a verdict. Shortly thereafter, Dryden dropped dead after an epic drinking binge. Without Dryden, Stack lee wasn’t quite so lucky in his second trial, and he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. But he continued to be a charmer in prison, and by helping the prison staff identify a theft ring, he gained a good reputation and was rewarded with parole after just a few years inside.[22] Freedom didn’t last long though – he was convicted again just a couple of years later for robbery, and though he was paroled again, died of tuberculosis in 1912.
Sarah: Within just a couple of years, the story of Stack Lee and Billy was already taking song form. In 1897, a newspaper in Kansas City reported that at an upcoming concert, a pianist would play “Stack-a-lee in variations,” suggesting that it was already a popular song known for having different versions.[23] Like other ballads, the song was likely actually a mishmash as performers took bits of existing songs and wove the story of Lee Shelton and Billy Lyons into them. In 1910 – when Stack was still alive – the folklorist and song catcher Alan Lomax first recorded a version of the song that was reportedly sung by the Black men who loaded and unloaded riverboats. This version included the repeated line, “Po’ Staggalee,” suggesting that Stack Lee – not the murdered Lyons – was the one who deserved the audience’s sympathy.[24] Subsequent versions added more to the story – Lyons’s grieving but immoral wife, a barking dog, and of course that the notorious Steton hat.
In 1918, the song had become such a standard that it inspired a pair of blackface minstrels who styled themselves “Stack & Lee,” and performers like Ma Rainey and Duke Ellington began to perform and record versions of the song. The song became deeply embedded in Black musical culture, and legends of Stack Lee became staples. The writer and scholar Cecil Brown wrote in his book Stagolee Shot Billy about his uncles’ recitations of Stack Lee lyrics, invoking him as a kind of model of Black masculinity: “Stagolee is a metaphor that structures the life of black males from childhood through maturity….The legend survives because black men pass it on. As culture critic Greil Marcus observes, Stagolee ‘is a story that black America has never tired of hearing and never stopped living out, like whites with their Westerns.”[25] So not unlike old English ballads, that referenced specific crimes but spoke to larger themes and which were adapted and changed over time, Stagger Lee is a song about one real murder, but which has come to convey much bigger and much older ideas about Black masculinity, power, and defiance.
Sarah: As we mentioned earlier, in the mid-20th century, the folk music revival that was initially inspired by the interest in ballads and square-dancing evolved into a huge musical trend. Artists who used traditional American musical forms to critique capitalism like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger led the way, followed by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan who helped make that folk style popular on a far wider scale. And with that folk revival, unsurprisingly, came a new era for the murder ballad. Dylan’s hugely popular 1963 “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll” was an adaptation of “Mary Hamilton,” (Child 173), the one that we mentioned earlier in which the Scottish lady-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots discusses murdering her baby. Dylan used the structure of the traditional murder ballad to draw attention to the racism at the heart of a very real, modern murder: the murder of a Baltimore bartender named Hattie Caroll at the hands of William Zantziger, the scion of a wealth tobacco-farming family in Maryland. Since “Hattie Carroll,” murder ballads have persisted, but have tended toward fiction rather than using real crimes as their inspiration. One of my favorite singer-songwriters, Jason Isbell, has used the format in recent years with songs like “Yvette,” in which the narrator describes preparing his Weatherby to shoot the father of a classmate who he is abusing; or in “Live Oak,” in which the criminal narrator – maybe? – murders his lover so she doesn’t find out about his past. But each new murder ballad, even those that are purely fictional, are part of a long tradition that pulls together performers and listeners from the front porches of the mountains of Appalachia to the manor halls and rowdy taverns of the Scottish-English borderlands.
Bibliography
Brown, Cecil. Stagolee Shot Billy. Harvard University Press, 2003.
Callahan, Scott Haden Church, and Audrey Halversen. “Too Young to Die: Narratives of Nineteenth Century American Murder Ballads.” Journal of American Culture 45: 2022.
Fumerton, Patricia and Anita Guerrini with Kris McAbee. Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800. Routledge, 2017.
Helman, Madison Ava. “I’ll Tell You No Lies:’ An Exploration of Trauma, Memory, and Violence Against Women in North Carolina Murder Ballads.” MA Thesis, West Virginia University, 2023.
Ivy, Natalie Rose. “This is a Traditional Song; We Can’t Let You Stay Happy Long:’ Gender, Social Politics, and Identity in 19th Century American Murder Ballads.” MA Thesis, University of Oregon, 2025.
Slade, Paul Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015),
Kader, Emily. “Rose Connolly Revisited: Re-Imagining the Irish in Southern Appalachia.” Journal of American Folklore 127: (Fall 2014).
Mehring, Frank. “Blood Thirsty Blues: The Sonic Politics of American Murder Ballads.” Crime and Music, Dine Siegal and Frank Bovenkerk, eds., 2021.
Spencer, ed.,Scott B. The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity (Scarecrow Press, 2012).
Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
[1] Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini with Kris McAbee, Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Routledge, 2017), introduction.
[2] Scott B. Spencer, ed., The Ballad Collectors of North America: How Gathering Folksongs Transformed Academic Thought and American Identity (Scarecrow Press, 2012),
[3] John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 205.
[4] Williams, Appalachia, 206.
[5] Williams, Appalachia, 208.
[6] Williams, Appalachia, 209.
[7] Williams, Appalachia, 210.
[8] Emily Kader, “Rose Connolly Revisited: Re-Imagining the Irish in Southern Appalachia,” Journal of American Folklore 127 (Fall 2014), 437.
[9] Kader, “Rose Connolly,” 438.
[10] Williams, Appalachia, 226.
[11]Paul Slade, Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015), 78
[12] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 79
[13] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 62-63.
[14] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 141
[15]Slade, Unprepared to Die, 144.
[16] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 116-118.
[17] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 121.
[18] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 134-136.
[19] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 9.
[20] Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, 2003), 23.
[21] Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 24.
[22] Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 27-37.
[23] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 19.
[24] Slade, Unprepared to Die, 20.
[25] Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 2.
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