Fahm Street, west side. Row houses built around 1850 – Frances Benjamin Johnston, ca. 1939
Farm (now Fahm) St. runs parallel to Ann St. in Yamacraw neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia
According to John Garst, Cooney Houston lived at 122 Farm St., Delia Green lived at 113 Ann St., and she was murdered a block away at Willie and Emma West’s home at 509 Harrison St., which is no longer in existence.

Note:  This is Part 1 of a two-part series on “Delia’s Gone” – See also Part 2

Introduction – “O, I am fortune’s fool!”

I wonder if you’ve seen that ‘meme’ that goes in part like this – “Romeo and Juliet is not a love story.  It’s a three day relationship between a thirteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old that caused six deaths…”

It’s curious what we leave out when we summarize in strokes too broad.

Traditional murder ballads based on real events, for example, tend to hide much if they survive today.  I’m not saying they always censor their violence of course, but they often make the rest of the tale simple and lean.  Our featured ballad this week, “Delia” or “Delia’s Gone”, certainly does.

Now, the actual story behind “Delia” is documented, well-known, and would have been right up Shakepeare’s alley.  On Christmas Eve in 1900, at a party in the Yamacraw neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia, Moses “Cooney” Houston was drunk.  He was publicly teasing his girlfriend Delia Green by calling her his “little wife”, implying something like a common law sexual claim on her.  She asserted her independence – they’d only being going together for a few months – and vehemently defended her chastity in front of the gathering. Then Delia “cursed him such a wicked curse,” calling Cooney a “son-of-a-bitch” and a liar.  Houston declared angrily that he’d had sex with her as much as he could count on his fingers and toes, and was asked to leave the party.  He promised to behave but apparently couldn’t calm himself and soon headed for the door.  As he did, he shot Delia with a .38 in the groin, then ran.  He was chased down and handed over to the police.

typical houses in Yamacraw neighborhood ca. 1909 – NYPL Digital Library

“Ok,” you’ll say, “but it’s not particularly worthy of Elizabethan dramatic imagination.  Mind if I cut out early?”  Right, I got it.  Man shoots woman.  We’ve seen this play before.  But, does it change anything for you to know that both Cooney and Delia were fourteen years old when it all went down?

Delia never made it to fifteen.  Most accounts say she died around 3:00 a.m. on Christmas morning at her mother’s home on Ann Street, a block away from the shooting.  Houston’s age is less clear, but he claimed to be fourteen when he shot Delia and if so would have been fifteen when convicted of the murder the next spring.  Whether or not he reported his age accurately, he was still quite young and escaped the gallows because of it.  He served twelve years of a life sentence before being paroled.

There are murkier details to the story as well, but at its core it’s about young teenagers, sex, alcohol, and a pistol. And interestingly, all of the variations on the murder ballad that arose from this sad tale *wholly ignore* that first element The Bard played upon to make a different sort of classic.  As with our popular perception of Romeo and Juliet, the ballads that tell the tale of Delia Green’s murder leave out this critical piece of information and ignore the role it played in the tragedy.

On the other hand, though the streamlined narrative may not make for cutting edge stagecraft, it did become one of America’s beloved murder ballads in the 20th century.  And it shows all signs of giving it a go in the 21st.  Check out The Little Willies (with Norah Jones) and their cover of Johnny Cash’s version of “Delia’s Gone” from 2011.  The story above doesn’t make much of an appearance, but it’s a fun take nonetheless!

Just the facts?

Now, this post isn’t about the facts of the murder case; like I said, that’s all covered and easily accessible elsewhere.  The blog Murder by Gaslight covers it most succinctly.

What we know comes in part from work done in 1937 by Chapman J. Milling (see “Delia Holmes – a Neglected Negro Ballad,” Southern Folklore Quarterly: Vol 1, No. 4, no link available.) In the year 2000, John Garst began to dig into the rest of the story, including some key unpublished work from the 1920’s by folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon. We can see some of Garst’s early findings online here, here, and here.  He published his definitive work in 2012 covering the facts of the case as well as details regarding the ballad.

Sean Wilentz penned an essay titled “The Sad Song of Delia Green and Cooney Houston”, included in his 2005 book with Greil Marcus The Rose and the Briar.  You can read that essay here, but the book is well worth the price.  The essay includes some of Garst’s findings but also gets in to a more ponderous space considering what the ballad emphasizes and what it leaves out.

Wilentz also provides an appendix (partly available online) with notes on the ballad and a discography. That work informs the rest of this post.  I’ll use as well this informal discography I found online.

In my second post for this series, I’ll come back to the story and some of the questions we can ask about it.  I’ll start that week off by looking at the two most well-known versions of the ballad today, by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, then follow it past the 1990s into the 21st century.

But my goal today is to provide a digital compendium of key versions of the ballad from its earliest documentation through 1992, such as we can link to here at least.  This page then is a one-stop lyrics and listening source for the historic “Delia.”  It is the one thing I find lacking online regarding this ballad.  We won’t need multiple posts across several weeks to cover it like we did with “Stagolee“, but there’s still much to consider and I can’t get it all done in one!  Even this post is going to be quite long; so, let’s get to it.

Written Sources: 1900 – 1937

Starting with Wilentz’s appendix and supplementing with what I found along the way, I’ll link up to as much of the early evidence as I can.  If you want to get straight to listening, just skip on down to the “Recordings” section!

“Delia” or “Delia’s Gone” is cataloged both as Roud #3264 and Laws I5.  It grew in two basic branches – one in the African-American southeast whence it came, and one in the Bahamas where it likely gained that refrain most recognizable today – “one more round, Delia’s gone.”

Waltz’s and Engle’s entry for the ballad in the Traditional Ballad Index reports the earliest instance of the ballad as 1927, but the reference is unclear as their six included citations are all later works.  It likely refers to page 11 of the Island Song Book, self-published that year by cartoonist John T. McCutcheon and his wife in Chicago.  It exhibits a version they collected from the Bahamas, including that refrain.  This, however, is not the earliest printed reference.

The following list may not be exhaustive, but according to multiple sources I consulted, it covers most of what we know is out there for now.

– Howard Odum collected a fragment of the ballad in Newton, Georgia sometime between 1906 and 1908.  It is #59 in the second part of his 1911 collection of African-American secular songs published in the Journal of American Folklore.  This version, a three verse fragment called “One More Rounder Gone”, implies Delia was a prostitute.

Zora Hurston; Rochelle Harris; Gabriel Brown – Eatonville, Fla. June 1935 – Photo by Alan Lomax (Library of Congress)

– Newman Ivey White’s 1928 American Negro Folk Songs, includes a five verse variant, “Delie”, collected in 1924 from Frank Goodell of Spartanburg, South Carolina, who reported he learned it sometime between 1900 and 1904.  It’s thin on details regarding motive for the murder.  White includes two other fragments which may be part of the same song, one from 1915 or 1916 in Alabama and the other from 1919 in North Carolina.

– Amelia Defries documented a version in the Bahamas in 1929, and published it in her book The Fortunate Islands.  (no link yet available)

– Zora Neale Hurston collected a version around Fernandina, Florida, when working for the FWP in the 30’s.  The portion of those lyrics available in publication suggests again that Delia was a prostitute.

– Chapman Milling’s article, mentioned above, includes a variant, “Delia Holmes”, with over 20 verses collected in 1937 from the “colored troubadour” Will Winn, of South Carolina. Those lyrics tell a much more detailed story than Goodell’s. Winn correctly identified the inspiration of the ballad as a murder in Georgia in 1900, though his lyrics do not get the motive quite right, claiming that Cooney shot Delia because she went back on a promise to marry him.  Milling includes two other South Carolina fragments, one collected in 1923 and the other in 1937, but he sees them both as musically “decidedly inferior.”

So 1924 is the earliest documentation of the ballad in full, but there is clear fragmentary documentation as early as 1906-08.  Certainly we can see in its early iterations that the ballad exhibited great variety.  You’ll find that pattern will hold as you work you way through the recorded examples below.  If you want to just dive in and avoid my curating, have at our Spotify playlist.

You can have a go at our shorter YouTube playlist as well.  Neither playlist is exhaustive.

Likewise, the sections below certainly do not cover every recording ever made of “Delia.”  However, the key performances are represented well.

Pre-War Recordings: 1924 – 1937

By one measure, the earliest known recording seems to be a commercial track by Reese Du Pree, called “One More Rounder Gone” and released by Okeh Records in 1924.

Lyrics to “One More Rounder Gone” by Resse Du Pree

If you check out the lyrics though, you’ll note that the narrative only strictly fits Delia’s story in that it assigns her name to the subject’s lover.  It otherwise seems to confuse Delia’s story (and tune) with “Frankie and Albert“, and the result is a narrative essentially distinct from both.  There are, though, lyric elements that we see morphed into other versions of “Delia”.

The Bahamas

Wilentz speculates that Du Pree’s record found its way to the Bahamas, less than 200 miles from Florida, and inspired the more recognizable refrain “one more round, Delia’s gone” which indeed seems to show up first there.  I think he’s *almost* right.  We can see in Odum’s work from 1911 above a more recognizable version of the “Delia” narrative with the ’rounder refrain’.  Given that Du Pree’s narrative is so far off the mark, I think it more likely that the song with the narrative we’d recognize found its way to the Bahamas in the oral tradition and, indeed, the ’rounder refrain’ changed in those islands to the one we so readily recognize today.  John Garst sort of leans in this direction, though he doesn’t evaluate the narrative in Du Pree’s lyrics. (See also “West Indies Blues” by John Cowley in Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From for a discussion of the longstanding interchange between the mainland and the Indies.)

At any rate, we see next a field recording of Delia collected by Alan Lomax and Mary Barnicle in 1935 in the Bahamas.  The story is much more what we’d expect from “Delia”, and not at all like Du Pree’s.  The murder happens ‘off stage’ and the motive appears to be Delia’s failure to marry ‘Tony’ as promised as in Will Winn’s 1937 Carolina version.  And there’s that new “one more round” refrain!

Lyrics to “Delia Gone” by the Nassau String Band

You can find that recording today on Deep River of Song: Bahamas – 1935, but it’s not a track that hit American radios or turntables in its day.

Roger Matthews (l) and Booker T. Sapps (r), 1935
Photo by Alan Lomax (Library of Congress)

Interestingly, we have a version recorded in the field in Florida a month earlier that same year. This performance, by Booker T. Sapps and Roger Matthews (with Willy Flowers on guitar), was collected on the same trip by Lomax and Barnicle before they went to the Bahamas.  Zora Neale Hurston was part of the effort in Florida as well, though she didn’t go to the islands.

Sapps, et. al. – “Cooney and Delia” (Spotify)

The recording quality is so poor that I can only make out a few words here and there, though it’s enough to tell that this isn’t the same version Hurston published, noted above.  It’s also clearly different from the Bahamian version.

So, 1935 brings us recorded evidence of two distinct, healthy branches for this ballad, one on the mainland and one in the Bahamas.

1937 saw another field recording, “All the Friends I Got is Gone”, by Blind Jesse Harris of Livingston, Alabama.  Though we can link to it, the recording quality makes it almost useless.  The title, however, suggest that the refrain was going through another change in the American south.  That would end up mattering a great deal decades later, as you’ll read below.

War-Era Recordings: 1939 – 1949

Blues musician Jimmie Gordon cut a commercial version of “Delhia” in 1939 for Decca.  This one is simple enough lyrically, being from the point of view of Delhia’s lover who is mourning her death.  However, there is subtlety in that it’s not clear if he’s the man that killed her with the ubiquitous early blues “Gatlin gun”.  The familiar ghost creeping around his bed every night suggests it’s so. But it’s also possible that this doesn’t represent good writing at all and the lyrics are more of a hodgepodge of three plus decades of ‘Delia verses’ that almost fit together well, and are thus confusing as to perspective.

“Delhia” by Jimmie Gordon (YouTube)        Lyrics for “Delhia” by Jimmie Gordon

A track waxed soon thereafter however would ultimately become one of the definitive versions of the ballad today.  Blind Willie McTell cut his record for John Lomax at The Library of Congress in November of 1940.  As with Gordon’s, the perspective seems to be that of her lover who lost her and it’s not entirely clear if the singer is “Cutty” who murdered her or is another guy who lost Delia as his lover to Cutty’s gun.  But here, there is a sense of lyric purpose.  The confusion of perspective seems like a masterful literary device.  It feels like McTell is singing exactly what he wants to, such that the listener’s imagination is evocatively engaged in the way all good storytellers hope.

Consider.  This Delia is living the ‘sporting life’ with all the other rounders. “Delia was a gambler, gambled all around…” Everything else that comes after seems to stem naturally and rhythmically from that truth.  It’s doubtful of course that McTell rewrote all the traditional lines himself, but it’s sure that few could have assembled and delivered them as he did.  Just listen, and you’ll know there is no question as to why this version is so important.

“Delia” by Blind Willie McTell (1940, Spotify)      Lyrics for “Delia” by Blind Willie McTell (1940 recording)

Now, though his track is certainly seminal today, it’s not clear to me at all when the public first heard McTell’s recording in the LOC’s archive.  It clearly doesn’t influence what comes immediately after, as you’ll see.  McTell also recorded a version in 1949 for Atlantic that remained unreleased for years.  Its lyrics are similar, but there is some variation. “Cutty” seems now to be “Kenny”.  And the refrain hearkens back to the “one more rounder gone” versions, unlike his 1940 recording where he sings “all I got is gone.”

“Little Delia” by Blind Willie McTell (1949 Spotify)  “Little Delia” by Blind Willie McTell (1949 YouTube)

Lyrics for “Little Delia” by Blind Willie McTell (1949 recording)

– “Delia’s Gone” and Back Again! – The Popular Ballad: 1952 – 1959

Many of those old lyrics talk about Delia in the graveyard trying to get back up.  In a sense, she did.  The song experienced a smooth rebirth from the world of the oral folk ballad to that of electronic popular entertainment, and it didn’t have anything to do with Blind Willie McTell.  Delia’s revival started during a post-War American craze for Calypso and Caribbean music, with a Bahamian version made popular by Blind Blake (Blake Alphonso Higgs, not to be confused with Arthur “Blind” Blake) on a release in 1952.  The island branch of the ballad thus became more prominent than the mainland blues branch, though McTell’s recordings would eventually help guarantee that the latter would stay strong as well.

Lyrics for “Delia Gone” by Blind Blake

Here I think we see circumstantial evidence for an earlier oral transmission between the mainland and the islands than DuPree’s 1924 recording.  These lyrics clearly reference a part of the actual murder case that is entirely accurate – that curse Delia gave to Moses, “you son-of-a-bitch”.  In the song it’s “such a wicked curse”, but it’s a line that must have come from some version of the song composed close in time to the actual murder.  It seems beyond possibility that so accurate a part of the narrative would perfectly fall into the song later by accident.  Now, I don’t see it thus far in any of the early lyrics I’ve been able to locate.  Obviously though, with as much variation as we see in the early sources, there must have been many versions that were never documented.  I’m all but positive we’re seeing remnants of one of them here, and I think it’s a good bet that it came to the Bahamas early.

Wilentz next makes an understandable error in his discography, placing Harry Belafonte’s 1954 “Delia” as the subsequent recording to Blind Blake’s.  However, that “Delia” (on Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites) is actually a different ballad written by Fred Brooks and Lester Judson, though they clearly nicked their last line from the traditional “Delia”.  Belafonte’s version of the Bahamian “Delia’s Gone” comes in 1959 (see below.)

The next recording then after Blind Blake’s was by none other than Pete Seeger, in 1954 on The Pete Seeger Sampler, where he claimed in the liner notes above the lyrics that this “Delia’s Gone” was a “Bahaman version of an American honky-tonk ballad.”  Note that even in these three short verses he is not copying Blind Blake.  Seeger as well as anyone could draw on multiple variants even to paint this short little sketch.

After Seeger’s came a track by the hugely influential Josh White, on his 1955 album The Story of John Henry.  Here we see that Blind Blake’s version – with its title, ‘new’ refrain, and that line about the “wicked curse” – clearly informed White’s.  However, there are other verses – such as those about the doctor, Delia’s mother, and that ghost creeping around the murderer’s bed – that are documented in the older versions from both the mainland and the islands.  White, like Seeger, was not simply reprising Blake.  The robust cross-pollination that typified its early days thus continued into this stage of the ballad’s life.

“Delia’s Gone” by Josh White (MySpace)      Lyrics for “Delia’s Gone” by Josh White

Note that White’s son, Josh White Jr., released an incredible version in his father’s style in 1982, that for my money is perhaps the most beautiful recording of this ballad that exists.  We also have a video of young White Jr. performing a slightly different take of the ballad on Hootenanny in 1963.

Back to our chronology, Paul Clayton and Bob Gibson both cut early Folk Revival versions in 1956, but I can’t link to them here.  Next then comes Harry Belafonte‘s take in 1959.  This, interestingly, is the first recorded version to which we can link that actually treats the sad narrative with clearly sad music.  And anything Belafonte produced in those days was heard by many.

“Delia’s Gone” by Harry Belafonte (Spotify)     Lyrics for “Delia’s Gone” by Harry Belafonte

The slow tempo leaves little room for detailed lyrics, even at four and a half minutes of play time.  This version seems more about evoking an immediate emotional reaction than about telling a story.  And interestingly, though the lyrics are clearly Bahamian and Belafonte’s early music was certainly popular because of his Caribbean approach, this particular take with its harmonica *almost* drifts into Country and Western territory!  It also seems to have inspired the City Ramblers Skiffle Group to produce a British skiffle version at some point soon thereafter (date unknown) notable for a verse more typical of “Stagolee” or “Duncan and Brady” about the Devil making a rumble underground by chasing Delia.  (Lyrics here)

– The Popular Ballad: 1960 – 1992

Now, given how long this post is getting, I hope you’ll forgive a bit of a fast forward as long as I give you links to what music I can.  Between Belafonte’s 1959 version and Bob Dylan’s in 1993, Wilentz cites 16 recordings (though one, by Al Stewart, is not our “Delia’s Gone”.) Another online discography adds another half dozen or so that Wilentz didn’t include and I found a few more by scouring Spotify, putting the total certainly over 20 for those thirty-odd years. Here are the ones to which I can link.  Many are derivative of what we’ve already heard, but I’ll indicate the ones I feel are ‘must hear’ versions and explain why below.

– Bobby Short (1960, must hear)
– Pat Boone (1960)
– The Montagu Three (1960)
– Burl Ives (1961)
– Johnny Cash (1962, see my next post for more on this one)
– The Kingston Trio (1963)
– Spider John Koerner (1965, must hear)
– Bobby Bare (1965)
– Stefan Grossman (1968, must hear)
– Waylon Jennings (1969)
– Roy Bookbinder (1970)
– David Bromberg (1972)
– Happy Traum (1977)
– Ron Wood (1989, instrumental)
– Cordelia’s Dad (1992, must hear)

In addition to Cash’s, at least four of these fifteen in my estimation deserve special attention.

Bobby Short‘s 1960 performance is simply outstanding aesthetically.  It’s a jazz / blues knockout about a brutal murder that will make you want to dance and, like so many of the other modern performances, relies on but moves beyond Blind Blake’s lyrics.

Spider Koerner‘s 1965 cut is unique in that it uses older lyrics, indeed those from Will Winn’s 1937 version with only minor changes.  It’s brilliant stuff!  I’d love to know the story as to why he chose that version to revive and how he came across it.  His playing, though simple, gives the song a blues drive it doesn’t usually have as well.

Most importantly, Stefan Grossman‘s 1968 performance of “All My Friends Are Gone” (lyrics) introduces a key development.  Along with Bookbinder’s “Delia” and Bromberg’s “Dehlia”, it represents a vital missing link.  Nowhere can I yet find Reverend Gary Davis‘s version of this ballad for you, but all three of the men I just mentioned studied guitar with him and play their versions of his take on it.  Davis’s influence on post-modern folk, blues, and rock is hard to overestimate of course. We’ll see in the next post that Davis’s version of “Delia”, along with Blind Willie McTell’s, informed Bob Dylan’s 1993 take on the ballad.  We can see now that the 1937 field recording by Blind Willie Harris, “All the Friends I Got is Gone” (cited above), indeed represented an offshoot of the ballad that found its fruition with Davis and those that found inspiration in him.  Grossman and the others then, through Davis, helped keep strong the connection to an old mainland version of “Delia” quite independent of Blind Blake’s.

Finally, though Cordelia’s Dad‘s version uses lyrics we’ve already seen, the musical interpretation is unique.  It may not be your cup of tea, but at least take a sip.

Rev. Gary Davis and child, ca. 1960, photo by Alice Ochs

Coda

Whew!  Well that was a lot, and we’re only about halfway through what I have to say about this classic American murder ballad.  Next up we’ll start with Dylan and Cash, because they represent the complicated Delia that makes it into the 21st century.

As well, that Delia is the one of whom we might ask the questions that take us beyond discographies and chronologies.  Some are the same questions we often ask about ‘boy kills girl’ traditional murder ballads.  Some are specific to Delia’s story.

Why not just go for those questions first?

I realize it will make for more interesting reading.  But in this instance I think that, despite the obvious omission of the facts about Cooney and Delia’s young age, we gain much from looking at what the variants of the ballad include.  Delia is over a century old now, and she’s got a lot to tell us.  Decent respect requires that we sit down and get to know her first before we start asking personal questions.  (For example – Don’t you wonder why so many of the versions make her out to be a prostitute?  I certainly do.)

So, until then, thanks for reading and listening this week folks!  We’ll have one more round soon..