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I started getting into these other people: Mississippi John Hurt, Dock Boggs, and Clarence Ashley. From that, I stumbled across an album called Old Time Music at Newport on Vanguard Records, with a bunch of Old Time music performers from the Newport Folk Festival. It has James Cottrell from West Virginia; it has Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, and Doc Watson. That record was where I first heard “Little Sadie,” with Clarence Ashley singing it. That song just really knocked me out.

That song was really, really amazing – just the story that it told. This fellow goes and kills his woman, he makes her run for it. Then I found other versions of this song. Doc Watson has these funny little comments he makes on the verses, like when the sheriff comes up, who is from Thomasville. He says, “Is your name Brown?” He says, “Yes, sir. My name is Lee. I murdered Little Sadie in the first degree.” Doc Watson then has this funny little comment, like “Oh, I got pretty sassy with him, didn’t I?” [Listen to Watson get sassy at Gerdes Folk City on Spotify here. Ed.]

I really enjoyed the storytelling and the way the dialogue worked between all the characters. The guy is not a redeemable murdering character. I thought that was interesting, because at that point, when I heard most country music, there was always a moral. There was definitely a Bible-toting finish that would happen, where the murderer would say, “Well, the Lord is going to deliver me.” Sometimes they say this because they are accused wrongly for the murder or because they repent as they are about to die. That was the sort of stuff I was used to listening to, so coming across “Little Sadie,” a character that was not apologetic about the murderer. That was something.

Doc Watson (photo by Austen Millkulka)

That fits with “Tom Dula” as well. When I heard Doc Watson’s version compared to “Tom Dooley” by The Kingston Trio, that really knocked me out. Watson had those details like “You hid her by the roadside for to be excused. You hid her by the roadside, then you hid her clothes and shoes.” Things like that were… Again, at the time, I was listening to music that was a lot darker. The descriptions of him hiding the clothes and shoes, and lines like “if it wasn’t for Sheriff Grayson, I’d be in Tennessee.” These ideas were really appealing to me: that you had a murderer that wasn’t apologetic, who just went and did it and then decided to take off.

Where most people my age went to punk rock or heavy metal, or after that screamo rock, this was my version of that. You have this really hard core music, but at the same time you could understand every word. There was a lot of space with just having a banjo or a guitar or a harmonica as the accompanying instrument.

I brought “Little Sadie” into Sankofa Strings, and “Tom Dula” into the Carolina Chocolate Drops. I had made my own versions based off of the stuff I had learned from listening to Mike Seeger’s records, and taking different traditional songs and rearranging them. I learned how to frail on the four-string banjo. Then, when I brought “Little Sadie” to the group, Rhiannon [Giddens] had learned the fiddle part, based off an earlier recording I had made. Then Sule Greg Wilson had that great drum part. We had this different sounding kind of African rhythm happening with “Little Sadie,” which was really a show stopper when we were performing that.

I bet. That was one of the things I was curious about, given that the Carolina Chocolate Drops were focused on reclaiming the black string band tradition. “Little Sadie” fits easily within that as a “Bad Man Ballad,” emerging from the African American tradition; but “Tom Dula” doesn’t. How did those songs fit relative to what the Carolina Chocolate Drops were trying to achieve at that point?

Like I said, there was an earlier version of the group called Sankofa Strings. Dona Gotta Ramblin’ Mind incorporated several tracks from them. With Sankofa Strings, the idea was to take some of the broader aspects of what black string band music could be, while the Carolina Chocolate Drops were more or less just playing Joe Thompson’s type of black string band music from Mebane, North Carolina. That was kind of the notion between those two groups. Sankofa Strings was always meant to be a bit more expansive, while Carolina Chocolate Drops was supposed to be just a straight Old Time group.

With “Tom Dula,” I had been reading about slide banjo, about Gus Cannon. I had been working up versions of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and a couple of what I considered the earlier, primitive slide blues numbers that have the banjo rhythm within them. When I started learning clawhammer, I noticed a song like “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” happened to be a banjo number that also happened to be a slide number. It just evolved into blues, at least rhythmically I could see those patterns. So, with “Tom Dula,” I played that one over my lap, Hawaiian style.

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