Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired "Stagolee," "John Henry," and Other Traditional American Folk Songs

PROLOGUE

The Streets of Laredo

I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy,

These words he did say as I boldly walked by

"Come sit down beside me an’ hear my sad story,

I’m shot in the breast an’ I know I must die"

In the winter of 1875–1876, a young man named Francis Henry (Frank) Maynard, only twenty-one years of age, was working as a cowboy near Medicine Lodge, a tiny village in southern Kansas. While he was there he heard some ranch hands singing a song called The Dying Girl’s Lament. So Maynard used a tune from an old Irish ballad, The Bard of Armagh, modified the lyrics of yet another Irish song, The Unfortunate Rake, did considerable rewriting, and came up with a song called The Dying Cowboy. In his original version, the first line was As I rode down by Tom Sherman’s bar-room, and the singer was not a cowboy but rather a ranger—someone who herded cattle on the open range. Then some cowboys who liked the song altered it a bit and changed the locale from Tom Sherman’s barroom, one of the toughest saloons in Dodge City, Kansas, to the streets of Laredo.

In the spring of 1876 Maynard headed to Texas to work as a cattle driver and found that a version of his song had already begun to make the rounds. A year or so later he returned home to Kansas, fell in love, got married, and by 1887 he and his wife had settled in Colorado Springs, Colorado. In 1911 he published the verses of The Dying Cowboy along with his other poems in a slender paperback booklet he issued himself called Rhymes of the Range and Trail. He remained in Colorado Springs, working as a carpenter, for the rest of his life.

Like The Streets of Laredo, the songs in this book are ballads that tell narrative stories, nearly always about individuals but every so often about groups, or events, or institutions. Ballads can be traced back many hundreds of years, but they became popular in England during the eighteenth century. Often based on folktales, and generally transmitted orally, the lyrics frequently changed over the years. One of the earliest ballad collectors, Francis James Child (1825–1896), was a professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University who published (posthumously) a multivolume work titled The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The Child ballads, as they came to be known, included songs about hardships, outlaws, feuds, rebellions, romances, superstitions, ghostly apparitions, historical events, political conflicts, love, and tragedies. Child even devoted an entire section to love-ballads not tragic.

At a more favorable time the whole subject may be resumed, Child stated, unless some person better qualified shall take it up in the interim. That well-qualified person was the British scholar Cecil Sharp (1859–1924). A graduate of Cambridge University, Sharp traveled to Australia, where he spent a decade teaching music theory, and on his return to England in 1889 he turned his attention to folk songs and folk dances. In 1911 he founded the English Folk Dance Society. In a video recording made in 1912, Sharp can be seen folk dancing with a few friends, and more than a century later, in 2014, a tribute was paid to him (available on YouTube) at the Folk Awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall.

From 1916 to 1918, Sharp made four lengthy visits to the United States, collecting an enormous number of songs—more than fifteen hundred in all—in the southern Appalachians: Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He traveled with Maud Karpeles, herself an avid collector and also a fellow folk dancer. When he arrived at Asheville, North Carolina, in July 1916, Sharp began collecting lyrics from young and old alike, songs such as Cumberland Gap, Johnson Boys, and Sourwood Mountain. Remarkably, he obtained seventy songs from one woman, including versions of Lamkin, The Cherry Tree Carol, The False Knight on the Road, and The Grey Cock. Sharp found a teenage boy who sang Mathy Groves very beautifully. In only nine weeks, he collected four hundred songs from sixty-seven men, women, and children. I just love the people and the talks I have with them in their cabins, he said, and by early 1919, having returned to England, he wrote: I am often dreaming about America and the wonderful time I had there and the invaluable experience I gained there.

Most of the people who appear in this book were contemporaries of Child and Sharp, and nearly all the songs about those people were already being sung during the lifetimes of the two renowned collectors. Many of the songs describe tragic events. Some are about murders, often resulting from love affairs gone wrong. Others tell of criminals who had to live outside the law or chose to do so. Still other songs describe calamities: railroad crashes and shipwrecks, natural disasters and industrial accidents. And some portray the brutal treatment of prisoners or the executions of criminals and radical critics of American society.

Virtually all the songs were written either while the events themselves were unfolding or very shortly thereafter. The lyrics often provide important information about those incidents and the circumstances in which they took place. The songs naturally reveal the outlook of those who wrote them, sang them, and listened to them. The songs also tried to teach lessons, either by condemning those who committed wicked acts or by praising those who behaved valiantly and sometimes even heroically. To understand how people lived in the past I utilize the songs’ lyrics, which are as trustworthy as most sources on which historians traditionally rely.

I have always loved these old songs and enjoy singing and playing them on the guitar and banjo. In the summer of 1957, as a college student, I traveled with my best friend to Asheville, North Carolina, to attend the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, which had been founded and was still being directed by Bascom Lamar Lunsford. For a reason I no longer remember, I telephoned him, hesitantly, for he was reputedly a man with many prejudices. (He did not allow blacks to perform at the festival.) Born in 1882, Lunsford had worked as a fruit-tree salesman, teacher, and lawyer, and during World War I he had kept himself busy tracking down draft evaders. Known for having written Good Old Mountain Dew (They call it that good old mountain dew / And them that refuse it are few), he eventually recorded more than 330 traditional songs for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

One of the most respected performers at the festival was Aunt Samantha Bumgarner. Born in 1878, she was, in 1924, the first woman to make a recording with the five-string banjo, and in 1928, the year the festival began, she made her first appearance on the stage. In 1935, sixteen-year-old Pete Seeger, attending the festival with his father, heard her play and decided, then and there, that he would take up the banjo. In June 1939 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her and other traditional singers to perform for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at a White House concert of American music. I found Aunt Samantha’s number in the phone directory, made a call, and she graciously invited us to visit her and swap some songs.

Nearly eighty years of age, she settled down in a rocking chair on her front porch, wearing high-top button shoes and a long granny dress, and played her banjo, on which were painted bees, butterflies, and flowers. She had been married, but her husband had passed away years before. Her repertoire included Worried Blues and Cindy in the Meadows, but she began by singing a song she had recorded many years earlier: Fly around my pretty little miss / Fly around my daisy / Fly around my pretty little miss / You almost drive me crazy. She passed away little more than three years later on Christmas Eve in 1960. I have included her photograph in the chapter on John Hardy.

Leaving the festival one evening we heard a five-string banjo, and there, standing outdoors, by himself, was tall, lanky George Pegram Jr., playing and singing Old Reuben: If this train runs right, I’ll be home Sunday night / I can hear Old Reuben when she pass / Poor Reuben, poor Reuben, oh Reuben ain’t got no home. In 1941, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Pegram had lost the sight in one eye; now he worked in tobacco fields, sawmills, and furniture factories, and also performed at Asheville. Riverside Records had recently brought out Banjo Songs of the Southern Mountains, an album that included several of his songs with accompaniment by the harmonica player Walter Red Parham. Lunsford, who had a testy relationship with Pegram, nevertheless made time for him at the festival, and he now delivered an impromptu performance, including a version of John Henry.

We encountered other musicians, too, on our visit to North Carolina, including Fiddlin’ Clarence Greene, who along with his son came to our hotel room, where, luckily, we had a tape recorder. He was sixty-three years of age, and even without any liquid refreshments—we were in a dry county!—he agreed to sing some songs for us. A superb fiddler and guitar player, he had, in the late 1920s, recorded more than two dozen songs for eleven different record companies. In 1928 and 1929, he had also participated in the Columbia Records field studio sessions held in Johnson City, as well as the Victor Talking Machine Company’s sessions in Bristol, Tennessee. His recording of Johnson City Blues was later imitated—often note for note—by guitar players, and, as a member of Byrd Moore’s Hot Shots, he recorded a version of The Ballad of Frankie Silver. That tragic story, and the song written about it, can be found in chapter 6.

In the summer of 1957, the color line was still tightly drawn in the small towns and rural areas of western North Carolina, as it was throughout the South. (Early that fall, bitter controversies would erupt over public school desegregation, and federal troops would be sent to several southern cities, notably Little Rock, Arkansas.) But exceptions to the regime of Jim Crow could sometimes be made for the sake of music. Late one afternoon we were trading songs with several white musicians, many of them farmers, who suggested we meet a black man, Dee Brown, who was an outstanding guitar player. After the sun had gone down, and night had fallen, they somehow got word to him, and he joined us. He was a gifted musician, despite having lost two fingers in an accident, and as he played—one song was Raise a Ruckus Tonight—we looked on admiringly, and, if memory serves, sang along with him. Later he left as quietly and as unobtrusively as he had arrived.

Quite a few of the songs in this book, more than half in all, describe events that took place in only three states: North Carolina, West Virginia, and Missouri. Like a great many people, the men and women about whom these songs were sung moved about from place to place, but they generally resided either in those states or elsewhere in the South: Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Louisiana. Migration and mobility have always been central features of American life, so even individuals who resided in the West or East had usually traveled widely or had journeyed from town to town.

All of the songs, at some point, were transcribed and eventually appeared in print—in broadsides, in newspapers, in journals, and certainly in books—but often the lyrics and even the tunes varied, sometimes quite considerably. As the years passed, verses might be added, or altered, or even dropped. At times, people in different parts of the country might well sing their own, favored versions, and even adapt the lyrics to their own personal circumstances. But whatever the version, the songs’ messages did not fundamentally change. Their essential meaning remained constant.

Hear My Sad Story traces the roots of many of these songs and describes the circumstances under which each was written and first recorded. Some of the songs—Frankie and Johnny, Jesse James, John Henry, and Casey Jones—are famous, known by countless numbers of people. Others, however—Engine 143, Duncan and Brady, Pearl Bryan, and Cole Younger—are less well known, at least outside folk-song circles. I have deliberately omitted songs that are fictitious or even lack a credible basis in reality. Every song in this book is truthful, is grounded in historical fact, and illuminates the social history of the times.

The songs tell how the American legal system worked and, in some instances, failed to work, for men and women, many of whom were poor, or African Americans, or immigrants, as well as for others who for one reason or another simply ran afoul of the law. More than half the chapters involve trials, often for murder, and guilty verdicts sometimes produced appeals to higher courts, including the United States Supreme Court. Other chapters concern deeds that perhaps should have been judged by the courts but in fact never were. Yet the crimes that were committed—as well as the evidence presented at the trials, the courtroom procedure, the conduct of the judge, the verdict of the jury, and the punishment meted out—all found their way into lyrics.

Most people seem to like singing these songs, sad though they may be, and derive comfort and pleasure from singing them. Hearing others sing them can also be enjoyable, rather like witnessing a tragedy on the stage or watching a heartrending movie. At some point everyone experiences misfortune, or heartbreak, or the loss of loved ones, and one way to cope with grief, to confront sorrow, is to seek solace in music. These stories and songs tell of tragic, sometimes heartbreaking, events, but reading the stories and hearing the songs may enlarge our capacity for compassion and understanding.

The songs in this book, while written at different times, always told people’s stories, often rather sad, about love and loss, work and struggle, hope and fear. A long time ago, a noted folklorist suggested that these ballads should be collected to ensure they would never be lost or forgotten. The songs, he said, the newer as well as the older versions, were the product of the people. Indeed they are and should always serve to remind us of our shared humanity.

St. Louis

CHAPTER 1

ST. LOUIS BLUES (1914)

I hate to see de eve’nin’ sun go down

Hate to see de eve’nin’ sun go down

Cause my baby, he done lef’ this town

William Christopher Handy wrote St. Louis Blues, but he spent very little time in that city and a most unhappy time at that. In 1892, when he was nineteen years old, he and a few friends made their way to Chicago, hoping to find work at the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition. But the fair was postponed for a year, and Handy ended up nearly three hundred miles away in St. Louis, down and out (as he put it): hungry, homeless, penniless, and lice-infested. He had to sleep in vacant lots, in poolrooms, or on the cobblestones of the Mississippi’s levee. Twenty-two years later, however—successful, married with a large family, and living comfortably in Memphis—he wrote his famous song. To compose it, he left home and rented a room over a bar on Beale Street, explaining: I could feel the blues coming on, and I didn’t want to be distracted, so I packed my grip and made my getaway. In the course of a single restless night he wrote what would become one of the most often-recorded songs of the first half of the twentieth century, second, in fact, only to Silent Night.

Handy was born in 1873 in Florence, a small town in northern Alabama, less than a decade after his parents had been freed from slavery. His father, Charles Bernard, was a farmer and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother, Elizabeth Brewer, had also somehow managed to acquire an education. Handy attended racially segregated schools, but his passion was music: as a teenager he saved enough money—$1.75—to purchase a cornet, only to incur his father’s wrath (Son, I’d rather see you in a hearse. I’d rather follow you to the graveyard than to hear that you had become a musician). In his family, Handy said, it was the church that mattered and not music, unless, of course, music served a religious purpose. He nevertheless befriended a black fiddle player, who taught him many songs, and on graduating from high school Handy left Florence to find work as a musician with a blackface minstrel company.

In 1893, after his ill-fated stay in St. Louis, Handy headed to Evansville, Indiana, where he found a job playing his cornet in a brass band while earning extra money as a janitor. Soon he met Elizabeth Price, and they were married in 1896. Then, that summer, he traveled to Chicago to join Mahara’s Mammoth Colored Minstrels, a troupe under white management that traveled throughout the South and also performed in Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Handy finally began to earn good money, as much as $200 a month, even splurging on a new gold-plated trumpet. The show, which included a female impersonator, would parade through the streets of a town, circling the public square in hopes that onlookers would pay admission to see the evening performance. Here is a contemporary account: The street parade is in full dress, silk hats and eight silk banners bearing various designs, with six Mexican-dressed drum majors and pickaninny drum corps, six walking gents with white Prince Albert suits and white silk hats, kid gloves and canes, with W. A. Mahara and his St. Bernard dog, Sport, in the lead of the parade.

W. C. Handy, ca. 1893. Courtesy of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.

As the band traveled through the South, it sometimes faced danger. In Tyler, Texas, in 1900, when several musicians came down with smallpox and news of the illness spread, whites chased the entire troupe to the outskirts of town, threatening to burn their railroad car and lynch the performers. In 1902, in New Madrid, Missouri, one of the musicians, Louis Wright, cursed a group of whites that had insulted him and his girlfriend. When angry men came after him, he drew his gun and fired at them. Backed by police officers, a group of whites assembled, began whipping members of the band, and finally located Wright: The law gave him to the mob, Handy wrote in his autobiography. He was lynched, his tongue cut out and his body shipped to his mother in Chicago in a pine box. On one occasion, white thugs pointed a rifle at Handy; on another, whites riddled his railroad car with bullets as it sped along. There was a hidden compartment under the floor of the train known as the get-away, which contained provisions, not to mention a small arsenal. Handy recalled: I had my own private collection of arms, a Winchester 44, a Smith and Wesson and a Colt revolver.

If I feel tomorrow lak ah feel today

Feel tomorrow lak ah feel today

I’ll pack up my trunk, and make ma git away

In the fall of 1900, Handy returned to Florence and joined the faculty of the State Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes. He taught music for two years, leaving, however, after angering the college president by arranging a concert of ragtime music. He briefly rejoined Mahara’s troupe and then in 1903 took a job in the small town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, as director of a black Knights of Pythias band. And it was there, he said, at a railroad station in Tutwiler, waiting for a train to take him back to Clarksdale, that he first heard the blues. He saw a lean, loose-jointed Negro playing a guitar, fretting the strings with a knife blade. His clothes were rags, his feet peeked out of his shoes, Handy recalled—in what became his most frequently quoted comment—and he was singing goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog—a reference to where the tracks of the Southern Railroad crossed those of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad.

The singer repeated the line three times, Handy continued, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. Soon afterward, Handy heard other black musicians playing the blues at a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi. A long-legged chocolate boy—he was twenty-one-year-old Prince McCoy, though Handy did not identify him in his autobiography—led a three-piece band consisting of a guitar, a mandolin, and a bass. Members of the audience were enthusiastic, Handy said, and soon began tossing coins to the performers. Shortly thereafter, he started to write blues lyrics of his own, recalling: That night a composer was born, an American composer.

In 1905 Handy moved with his wife and family—by now there were three children—to Memphis, bought a small house in an area known as Greasy Plank, and formed a band. For several years, he hired musicians to play for dances, often on Mississippi riverboat excursions. Then, in 1909, he wrote a campaign song for Edward H. Boss Crump, who was running for mayor. (At the time, Crump supposedly said—naturally, he denied making the remark—If you put Judas Iscariot on the ballot, he’d get a thousand votes in Shelby County.) Crump was duly elected—with strong support from those blacks who were still allowed to vote in the city—took office in 1910, and held the position for five years. One of Handy’s verses in Mr. Crump was

Mr. Crump don’t like it, ain’t gonna have it here

Mr. Crump don’t like it, ain’t gonna have it here

Mr. Crump don’t like it, ain’t gonna have it here

No barrelhouse wimmen, God, drinkin’ no beer

Mr. Crump don’t like it, ain’t gonna have it here

Years later, Handy rewrote the song, calling it The Memphis Blues, and added the catch line, Mr. Crump can go and catch hisself some air!

Comfortably settled in Memphis, where he would remain for the next ten years, Handy went to see the mayor, hoping to obtain his permission to publish the song, which he eventually titled Memphis Blues (or Mr. Crump). I told him it would be all right, Crump said. But by 1912, having had no luck finding a publisher, Handy made what his biographer David Robertson called the worst business decision of his life, selling his rights to the song to a deceitful white music publisher for a paltry fifty dollars. So a year later, when public demand led to the printing of an additional fifty thousand copies, Handy received no royalties. Before long, a white man—in blackface—was performing the song on a national tour with lyrics that differed from those that Handy had composed. Although Handy was not credited as the song’s author, his name was included in the verse: I never forget the tune that Handy called the Memphis Blues.

At the time, the city was a hub of the blues, and Handy was one of many composers who were making use of the new musical form. As Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have noted, Handy’s autobiography conspicuously avoided mentioning the continuous barrage of professional blues-based activity that was ringing from the little vaudeville theaters within earshot of his Beale Street office. If Beale Street really could talk, it would speak not of a single father figure but of a groundswell movement in which commercial possibilities for the blues were explored by a host of aspiring entertainers. Those entertainers included the pianist Cornelius Taylor, often known as Old Folks, and a husband-and-wife comedy team, Willie Perry and Susie Johnson, who went by the names of Long Willie and Little Lulu, or the Too Sweets. Music could be heard in five theaters in a two-block area of North Memphis, and, indeed, all over town.

Even as he was making a name for himself in the music business, Handy acquired a partner: Harry H. Pace, the son of a Georgia blacksmith, who had been working as a bank cashier. A graduate of Atlanta University, Pace had once been associated with W. E. B. Du Bois in publishing a black weekly newspaper. In 1907 he met Handy, and the two men decided to create the Pace and Handy Music Company. They remained associates even when Pace later moved to Atlanta. (In the 1920s, Pace, a successful entrepreneur, would form a record company, and he later founded the Northeastern Life Insurance Company.) Soon they were jointly copyrighting and marketing songs, chiefly blues, rags, and an occasional march—such as Handy’s Hail to the Spirit of Freedom—with Pace often writing the lyrics and Handy the music.

The most famous song the firm published was St. Louis Blues, for which Handy wrote both the words and the music. He described its genesis in his autobiography: One day in 1914, he claimed, he felt gloomy and down in the mouth. So, not wanting to be distracted by his wife and children, he rented a room over a bar on Beale Street. In composing the song, he said, he imagined the time, more than twenty years earlier, when he was homeless, wandering the streets of St. Louis, broke, unshaven, wanting even a decent meal…without a shirt under my frayed coat. And he conjured up the memory of a woman stumbling along the poorly lighted street murmuring, Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea.

So, he said, he decided to create a blues song that would combine ragtime syncopation with a real melody in the spiritual tradition. He also wanted to use the black vernacular, the rhythms of the tango, and an unusual chord—a G seventh rather than a G—to begin the verse. His goal, he said, was to use all that is characteristic of the Negro from Africa to Alabama. Further, he wanted to convey a spiritual effect by shifting, atypically, from the subdominant C chord to the tonic G. The song began with the line, I hate to see de eve’nin sun go down, and as Handy’s biographer said, no other American lyricist so effortlessly and so confidently employed the language that real people, white or black, used in the United States at that time.

William Christopher Handy, July 17, 1941. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Saint Louis woman wid her diamon’ rings,

Pulls dat man ’roun by her apron strings

’Twant for powder an’ for store-bought hair,

De man ah love would not gone nowhere, nowhere

Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be

That man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea

Handy reported that his wife was upset by his disappearance for an entire day, but the members of his band seemed to enjoy his predicament.

The lyrics of St. Louis Blues were far bolder and more daring than any of Handy’s earlier compositions. In one line—Cause I’m most wile bout ma jelly roll—Handy even used the slang term for a woman’s sex organ. Elsewhere, he employed the phrase ball the jack (A black headed gal makes a freight train jump the track / But a long tall gal makes a preacher ball the jack), a commonly used euphemism for sexual intercourse; that it was a man of the cloth who was engaged in the act added a purposefully irreverent touch. Other phrases, such as Blacker de berry, sweeter am de juice, were similarly suggestive. Yet despite his use of slang, Handy did not employ the hackneyed language of the black minstrel show. To the contrary, the words do not convey ignorance, helplessness, or foolishness. The song is the plaint of someone who is hurting, but there is a frankness and toughness in the telling about it.

Once he had completed the song, Handy wrote in his autobiography, time and chance were conspiring to snatch me away from Memphis. The episode that appears to have triggered his decision was his presence at the aftermath of a particularly horrific lynching. In May 1917, a thirty-eight-year-old black woodchopper, Eli Persons, was charged with the rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old white girl, Antoinette Rappal. On May 21, while he was being transferred from the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville to Memphis, a lynch mob seized him. A crowd, numbering perhaps five thousand men, women, and children, then turned out, in a carnival-like mood. A black journalist reported: Persons was chained down, had a large quantity of gasoline poured over him, and set alight. The mob cheered gloatingly as the match was applied. Then, Persons’s body was decapitated and dismembered, and portions of his remains were taken to Memphis, where his head was thrown from a car at a group of African Americans.

Handy was there. He related that one morning he noticed a crowd of Negroes gathered around a skull that had been severed from a body (he called the victim Tom Smith): The eyes had been burned out with red-hot irons. A rural mob, not satisfied with burning his body, had brought the skull back to town and tossed it into a crowd of Negroes to humiliate and intimidate them. Handy reported his reaction, a mixture or horror, anger, and depression: All the savor had gone out of life. For the moment only a sensation of ashes in the mouth remained. He thought back to other acts of brutality he had witnessed in the South, the outrageous crimes, the viciousness of white mobs, and the unwillingness of white law enforcement authorities to intervene: I appealed to the town marshal for protection, he recalled about one incident. He scoffed at my plea and went to the aid of the man who had struck me. Handy also recalled having had to hide deep in a field to avoid a mob. So he made up his mind to escape from the South, and in 1918 he did: he moved