Ain’t gonna tell you no lies
“As our American culture advances, it may be that classes will take up the Frankie songs as seriously as a play by Molière or a Restoration comedy or the Provençal ballads of France….While the Frankie story deals with crime, violence, murder, adultery, its percentage in these respects is a good deal less than in the average grand opera.”
–Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag
Motion picture treatments of the “Frankie and Johnny” story came out during Frankie Baker’s lifetime. These brought her renewed and unwelcome notoriety, and made money for others at her expense. Brown notes that at one trial, the defense called “Sigmund Spaeth, an authority on popular songs and ballads. Fifteen years before, in 1927, Spaeth had written a book in which he stated that the ballad ‘Frankie and Johnny’ was based on the Frankie Baker incident…. Now, after receiving an expert witness fee of $2,000, Spaeth took the opposite position, claiming that the song had not originated in St. Louis and that Frankie Baker had not inspired its creation.” Brown notes that the trial played out along unsurprising racial lines, and that Baker came out on the short end.
MacEdward Leach’s “The Ballad Book” (1955) acknowledges the tie to the story of Baker and Britt, and notes that “Johnny” was substituted (into the popular version) by a vaudeville team in 1911, but says that “the Frankie and Albert ballads are certainly older than 1899.” The author writes:
“Its origin and authorship are still disputed; we are not even sure whether it is originally Negro or not. Negroes everywhere sing it, usually the protagonists are Negro, and there are many touches of Negro style. If the Negro did not originate it, he certainly worked on many versions of it”
He notes that some attribute the song to the story of Frankie Silver, in North Carolina in 1831.
Leach’s book cites H.M. Belden, (ed.) Ballads and Songs Collected by the Missouri Folk-Lore Society(1940) and Vance Randolph, Ozark Folk Songs for corroboration on the point that the ballad is older than 1899. I was able to find Belden’s book fairly easily, but I haven’t yet seen a copy of Randolph’s evidence.
The summary in Belden begins as follows:
“The origin and history of this, one of the most widely known and sung of native American ballads, has never been made out. Thomas Boer, The Mauve Decade 120, says it ‘was known on the Mississippi in the ‘50s and was chanted by Federal troops besieging Vicksburg in 1863; a copy of twelve stanzas was made by a young officer and is preserved.’ And a footnote adds: ‘Mr. Emerson Hough dated this song from a murder at Natchez in the ‘40s.’ I have not been able to get any documentation of these claims.”
Thus, in some ways, it seems to be a case of the proverbial turtles going all the way down—all the evidence is based on citations of people who say they have evidence. Leach cites Belden, Belden cites Boer, etc. Belden’s account goes on to add that Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag also places it before 1899, and notes that researchers have thought that “the original ballad has been ‘readapted, probably more than once, to modern instances of underworld life.’”
As it happens, my ordered copy of Sandburg’s Songbag arrived last night. While his introduction to “Frankie and Albert” is terrific (see above), he doesn’t do much to resolve the question. In fact, he cites Belden, and asserts that “Frankie and Albert” was common along the Mississippi river as early as 1888. “Frankie and Johnny,” he says, came later. Still more turtles.
Sandburg does mention some important factors about the source material, noting that the tune probably derived from “My Lady in the Guinea-Blue Gown.”
Sandburg includes multiple versions of the ballad in the Songbag, showing that even Frankie doesn’t have a consistent name across versions of the song. His introduction is amazing. He writes, “The restless sons of Man in the mountains of Kentucky sometimes descend to the plains and live in the big cities, in the centers of wickedness, in the tents of the ungodly.”
As Sandburg notes, one of two courses is probable; either “Frankie” came from the city, and settled as “Josie” in the country side, or started as “Josie” in the countryside and became “Frankie” in the latter. He writes, “When the song history of America is definitively written, we shall know about these things.” I’m curious when Sandburg thought such a history would be possible.
In the end, we have an interesting question. Is it the case that the essential elements of this song are so basic—the jealous shooting of a cheating lover—that the song sort of drifts along in collective imagination and occasionally stumbles upon an actual case that fits it closely enough to make that case seem to be the origin of the story?
Alternatively, could it be that some sort of conscious or unconscious act served to deny the African-American sources of this ballad, either Frankie Baker or Bill Dooley, their full stature in the events and the role in cultural production of a ballad this popular? This seems like a stretch, at least on the issue of race, as other African-American musicians and composers of that time have their authorship intact.
I haven’t yet had the time to dig all the way down through the citations, but it seems that one of my sources, dating from 1927 to 2005 would have included a copy of some kind of documentary evidence—be it civil war or otherwise—of a preexisting version. All that exists is hearsay. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, perhaps it’s just non-literate folk process, but it is peculiar.
This is not to indict Sandburg or anybody else in particular with a deliberate racist agenda in framing their analysis of these songs. I believe that Sandburg was a progressive on the issue of race, relative to his time.
Perhaps it’s not Dooley that these scholars consciously or unconsciously want to hide. Perhaps it’s Frankie Baker. I think the issue of whether such a level of artistic creation from underworld, minority culture sources could have been imagined by scholars of the early 20thcentury is a big part of Cecil Brown’s purpose in quoting James Baldwin in an epigraph to his essay on “Frankie and Albert:” “It is only in his music, which Americans can admire because a protective sentimentality prevents their understanding of it, that the Negro in America can tell his story. It is a story that has yet to be told and no American wants to hear.”
The actual case of Frankie Baker and Allen Britt only marginally fits the narrative of most versions of the song. The song’s narrative itself, as we have seen, deals with a kind of timeless material—the scorned woman. Perhaps the narrative, even of the “folk” type, was bowdlerized a bit because the details of Frankie’s prostitution and Albert’s threatened violence were too sordid.
My hunch is that Brown is right, but that this wouldn’t necessarily require an overt attempt on anybody’s part to take away the origination of the song from Dooley’s inspired rendering of Baker’s tragic turn. That is, there were probably a variety of “Hell hath no fury…” ballads flowing through various streams of the culture. Dooley’s version, and the subsequent version published by Tell Taylor in 1912, came at the dawning of recorded music. They appear to be the primary sources for all or most of the versions we have today. In a way, if there were prior streams, they came together in a particularly compelling artistic rendering by Dooley, and then quickly diverged out again.
Brown’s comparison of Dooley to Shakespeare, or a comparison we might make of Dooley to Bob Dylan, is probably apt. Part of his genius was to draw together the cultural sources around him and infuse his works with a distinctive artistic stamp–perhaps the creator of our “original” was an “integrator,” to use Eleanor Long-Wilgus’s distinction.
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A brief coda on the subject of unreliable narrators with the help of the late, great Sam Cooke (who himself met a violent and tragic end):
“Frankie and Johnny,” by Sam Cooke (Spotify) — studio version. The live version is linked below.
This is a more modern treatment, but I add it here because Sam Cooke was a vocal genius, and because its addition of “at least that’s how the story goes” to the lyrics is one of a variety of lyrical gestures in various versions of the song that subtly cast doubt on the reliability of the narrative. “Ain’t gonna tell you no stories. Ain’t gonna tell you no lies” should probably be counted among them. Perhaps it’s just to fit the rhyme and meter, but I think many of these songs at least implicitly allege that the people speaking are not always to be fully believed—sometimes the protagonists/antagonists, sometimes the narrator.
It’s also interesting that Cooke’s Johnny does a good bit of bargaining with Frankie after being mortally wounded; ultimately coming around to telling the truth. He’s about to die, but his first appeals to her after the shooting allege that it was all one big misunderstanding. The last one doesn’t.