G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter

[This is the second post this week on “Tom Dooley.” The first post gives the basics of the underlying story.]

Hardly a fiddler or a banjo picker in our county…

“I’ll tell you all Verlee and I can remember about Tom Dula…. Laura Foster was a cousin of Grandpa Harve Foster. She and Dula were engaged. Tom got to running around after this other woman, we can’t remember her name. She and Tom planned to lure Laura off and kill her. Laura and Tom were horseback riding in the woods somewhere near Happy Valley, and the other woman stepped out and stabbed her in the side. They stuffed handkerchiefs in her side to stop the blood. People hunted for her for some time, and one day a man found her because the horse he was riding smelled her and was snorting, etc. She was in a shallow grave, her head between her knees. The other woman, on trial, packed it on Tom and he never did tell she did it. She would say on trial, ‘A rope will never go around this pearly white neck.’ Tom was hanged, and later, on her death-bed, she confessed. The legend or story goes, and I’ve heard Grandma tell it a hundred times, that you could hear meat frying and see black cats running up and down the walls of the room she was in when she was dying.”

  -Letter from Mrs. Orene West Burrell to her brother, John Foster West, written April 24, 1948. (There are a few factual inaccuracies, or at least questionable claims, in this passage.)

In anticipating writing this week’s posts, “Tom Dooley” often seemed too big to handle. So many paths present themselves, with several different ways of looking at the song and many different performances. What struck me as I dug in, though, is that the song’s true popularity is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to many of the murder ballads we discuss–including some based on events that happened well after Dula’s execution in 1868. The ballads about Tom Dula were mostly regional curiosities before one was boosted into worldwide prominence by The Kingston Trio’s calypso-tinged rendition. I have a theory about why this is. That theory involves, as they say, “the rest of the story,” what that story is, and who supplies it.

The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, vol 2., (1952) explains that three “native North Carolina” ballads emerged from the rather twisting and sordid tale of Laura Foster’s demise, which we explored in the previous post. We’re going to focus on the most famous one of those ballads–ironically, the least ballad-like of the three.

Harry Smith

John Edward Fletcher mentions several times that John and Alan Lomax included the song in their Folk Song U.S.A.: The 111 Best American Ballads  in 1947, but it was not included in several other significant collections, including the Lomaxes’ own American Ballads and Folk Songs, published just 13 years prior. Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag (1927) neither includes the song nor mentions it (as far as I can find). My other go-to source, MacEdward Leach’s The Ballad Book (1955) also ignores it. It’s hardly a scientific survey, but those are three rather significant strikes in my book when it comes to gauging the widespread popularity of the song prior to 1958.

Let’s cap that dim assessment off with the song’s omission from Harry Smith‘s widely influential Anthology of American Folk Music, which appeared in 1952. Smith included a another recording, “Omie Wise,” from the first artists to record “Tom Dooley,” but either didn’t hear this particular song or didn’t think it worth including. When you think about it, with just the snippets of the story we have in “Tom Dooley,” what does it give us that we can’t find elsewhere in other murder ballads? So many others are more poetically satisfying and narratively complete.

The source cited most frequently about the Tom Dula songs in the Frank C. Brown Collection, a Mrs. Sutton, says the following of this version of “Tom Dula”/”Tom Dooley”: “It was very popular in the hills of Wilkes, Alexander, and Caldwell counties in 1867. Many mountain ballad singers still sing it.” These are the lyrics that she provides.

Hang down your head, Tom Dula,
Hang down your head and cry;
You killed poor Laura Foster
And now you’re bound to die.

You met her on the hill-top
And God Almighty knows,
You met her on the hill-top
And there you hid your [sic] clothes.

You met her on the hill-top,
You said she’d be your wife,
You met her on the hill-top
And there you took her life.

Seems familiar, right? It’s also pretty incomplete, as far as ballad story telling goes. We’ll get back to that.

If we can trust Mrs. Sutton’s date, the song’s regional popularity in that three county area in 1867 is rather unsurprising, in that that was the year between Laura Foster’s murder in 1866 and Tom Dula’s execution in 1868. The song may be a kind of  musical tabloid journalism about the case, or perhaps an expression of popular sentiment about Tom’s guilt. Perhaps it’s emblematic of why Vance’s request to change the venue for the trial was a good idea, even if ultimately unsuccessful. The song makes no mention of Ann Melton. Sutton also attributes the music to an old banjo tune composed by an African American musician, Charlie Davenport.

The Brown collection also cites Thomas Smith of Zionville in Watauga County, North Carolina and a similar set of lyrics, with Smith’s comment that the “verses are from a song which has been sung and played for many years (probably for over forty) in Wautauga [this was in the 1920’s]…There is hardly a fiddler or banjo picker in our county who cannot play ‘Tom Dooley.'”

I want to be cautious about making sweeping claims about how far the song traveled and when, but I’ve so far only been able to substantiate its popularity in a four or five county area of western North Carolina up until The Kingston Trio hit it big, or maybe a little bit from 11 years before hand. This could just be an illusion of perspective, favoring only known recordings and printed publications. I have a theory as to why the song endured in place, and a suspicion as to why it didn’t migrate really far until 1958. We’ll need to listen to it a bit more first.

Grayson, Proffitt, and Warner 

How did the song make its way to The Kingston Trio? Well, this will get us, finally, into the music.

The earliest available recorded version of the tune comes from G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter. Some sources date the recording to 1927, others to 1930. Grayson was the grand-nephew of the Union Army Colonel who helped bring in Tom Dula, so his lyrics inject a bit of family history into the story.

You can find a transcription of Grayson’s lyrics here. The text above the lyrics on the linked page contains several factual errors about the story, but there are some new ones, so you may find it entertaining.

G.B. Grayson died in a car accident in 1930. Had his career continued, it’s possible he might be viewed as the artist responsible for bringing “Tom Dooley” to the world.

As it happens, however, The Kingston Trio version more likely traces back to the version collected by Alan Lomax‘s friend, Frank Warner, as he received the song from Frank Proffitt in 1937. Warner performs the song with Pete Seeger in the clip that I included in the previous post. In the clip below, Lomax tells a bit of the story, and the clip includes a performance by Frank Proffitt, Jr., son of the man who gave it to Warner. Chuck Shuford accounts here for how the various “sources” for the song addressed the copyright dispute after the Trio’s version became a hit, and how radio DJs helped popularize the recording.

Lomax claims that his acquiring of the song from Warner and Proffitt, and playing it on his radio program, was what brought the song to The Kingston Trio’s attention. Through Shuford’s account, we learn that the Trio heard it from “a long forgotten folk singer auditioning at the Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco.” I have no good way at this point to assess how much success Lomax had in disseminating the song nationally before its becoming a “world song” with the Trio. But, I have yet to find a source for a recording, let alone one of any significant popularity, between Grayson and Whitter’s 1927 recording and The Kingston Trio’s breakout hit in 1958, despite Warner’s 1937 collection of the song and Lomax’s 1947 publication of it in Folk Song, U.S.A.,. “Tom Dooley” made the transition from five counties to five continents extraordinarily quickly, becoming a true folk standard only after it had become a pop hit.

“Tom Dooley” retained enduring regional popularity for close to a century without much success in spreading to the wider country. This differs, for instance, with “Omie Wise,” which was older, and “Frankie and Johnny,” which was younger (although that’s contested), both of which also referred to actual historical events.

Frank Proffitt

Several reasons present themselves as to why this would be. The song was from a relatively rural and mountainous part of the country, rather than an urban center or transportation hub (like St. Louis). The window of opportunity between the beginning of the age of recorded popular music and 1958 was relatively short, with most of the recording business dedicated to different fare. The incipient folk boom was primed and ready for this song to take the main stage as the Eisenhower years drew to a close.

I have an additional theory, though, that strikes me as having at least some explanatory value. It may be just one piece of the puzzle, but it provides one possible explanation as to why the song held on as it did for so long in one place without fading into obscurity, and then catapulted into an international hit. It has to do, as we’ve seen before, with the story that isn’t there. It also taps into some of our recurring themes here with regard to how murder ballads “function” in the minds of singers and listeners.

The story that isn’t there

You’ll notice that the version collected by Mrs. Sutton, The Kingston Trio version, and even the ones with additional verses performed by Proffitt and Grayson and Whitter, are rather light on the details–particularly relative to the many known details of the underlying story–however inconclusive and/or unseemly they may be. In some respects this is unsurprising, as nobody witnessed the crime and there aren’t too many rhymes for “syphilis” (you wouldn’t want them if there were). “Tom Dooley” is very cursory in its story telling, and the verses have a rather arbitrary relation to each other. Sometimes they seem merely verbal ornaments for the banjo or fiddle tune. We’ll focus on this feature in the next post.

My theory is that “Tom Dooley” stayed in the local repertoire over a period of more than 60 years because much of its local audience knew the rest of the story, or at least some salacious parts of it. They could supply the story that wasn’t in the song itself. And, importantly, many knew that story was in many ways unresolved; and they were also aware that their friends and neighbors, as witnesses or jurors, helped convict Dula and send him to the gallows. Tom Dula was dead, but many were uncertain that he was guilty or alone guilty of killing Laura Foster. You can hear echoes of these doubts in the conversation surrounding the song in the Frank Proffitt, Jr. clip above. The quote at the top regarding the tortured conscience, or syphilitic hallucinations, of Ann Melton also shows the lingering local suspicion that she was the primary culprit in the whole affair. In the minds of some, “Tom Dooley” was likely an ironic refrain on executing the wrong person, or a kind of lament for not getting Ann Melton convicted, too.

Perhaps more simply, as several commentators have noted, the underlying story has the elements of Greek myth or Greek tragedy–although perhaps not of the Sisyphean variety. But, it also has any number of elements that you’d just as soon not mention in polite company. So, the song distills the first and eschews the second in the service of making a better story. The audience can supply as many of the additional details as they think they know. In this respect, it is very much like “Frankie and Johnny,” in which a prostitute killing her pimp in self-defense gets turned into a scorned-woman ballad.

But, if the implicit back story helped the local folk enjoy the song, how did The Kingston Trio’s version manage to catch fire with people all over the world who didn’t know the story?

To a certain extent, “Tom Dooley” in the Trio’s hands was a pretty “safe” murder ballad, not particularly grisly, and relatively sparse on the narrative detail. Contrast it, for instance, with “Knoxville Girl,” which the Louvin Brothers recorded around the same time–a country hit, surely, but not a song with anything approaching “Dooley’s” popularity. You can wager that part of the “Dooley’s” power lies in its soulful refrain, with “poor boy, you’re bound to die.” But, I think that part of why the song took hold is that the Trio injected the factually incorrect “Eternal Triangle” story into their spoken introduction, or at least the wrong “Eternal Triangle” story. Remember their introduction? It goes like this:

Throughout history
There’ve been many songs written about the eternal triangle
This next one tells the story of a Mr Grayson, a beautiful woman
And a condemned man named Tom Dooley…
When the sun rises tomorrow, Tom Dooley… must hang…

Through a few short spoken lines containing some incorrect inferences, the Trio succeeds in giving listeners just enough story to make the limited lyrics of the song meaningful, but lets them fill in the gaps themselves. It gives them something to care about, and perhaps to resonate with. There’s love, there’s death, and there’s mystery. The story can therefore easily have more emotional truth than the real one, depending on how you fill in those gaps. Rather than jealousy, vengeance, adultery, and sexually transmitted infections, you have rivalry, romance, and remorse.

As I suggested in the previous post, the significance of “Tom Dooley” lies mostly in its influence as a seminal moment in the Folk Revival of the 50’s and 60’s. However sensational the underlying story, the song itself is so restrained as to make that story almost irrelevant. Through omitting, cleaning up, and/or fundamentally altering the underlying story, “Tom Dooley” became a murder ballad that introduced the genre to many people. Despite its relatively clean-cut appearance, whether in the hands of The Kingston Trio or others, we can still see many of the key elements of good storytelling and grim remorse that mark many of its far more gritty and thorough brethren. Getting the story wrong in the right ways is important. [Paul Slade makes a similar point about the Trio’s particularly economical storytelling in his piece on the song.]

Next up

The Carolina Chocolate Drops

Having attended more thoroughly than I expected to both the history and the lyrics, I plan to give the next post up almost entirely to the music. I’ll let Doc Watson kick things off, and explore how “Tom Dooley” sits slightly off-center, musically, as a ballad, but mostly pick out a few performances that strike me as well worth a listen. After that, if I’m lucky, I’ll add another post of some other directions the Tom Dula story took, both musically and not.

As a foretaste of the next post, I’ll leave you with the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ performance of “Tom Dula,” which is perhaps the most modern version of the song that remains faithful to the Grayson and Whitter source–and perhaps thereby to the string band banjo tune origins of the melody.

Tom Dula “Tom Dula” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops (Myspace)