Note: This is Part 1 of a three part series on “Little Sadie” – See also Part 2 and Part 3

Introduction

Our hiatus is over.  Hello and welcome back!  Or, if this is your first time with us, welcome! I have the honor of writing about the first song for Murder Ballad Monday’s third year of blogging, and the one I’ve chosen is most appropriate.  It sits squarely at the intersection of two traditions – the Anglo-American murder ballad and the African-American bad man ballad.  Smithsonian-Folkways includes different versions on both its Classic African-American Ballads and its Classic Old Time Music collections.   As Doc Watson said, “this one is sort of a ballad and blues combined.”  (See track 3, on my playlist below.)

We’ll get to all that, but let’s begin with the fact that most versions make clear what we’re dealing with from the first verse; the cold-blooded murder of a woman by her lover.  She was killed by her man with a large caliber pistol.  Consider this one verse scrap from Cecil Sharp’s notebook in 1918, an image of which caps this post; it pretty much says it all.

I went out last night and walking around
I met my Satey and I blowed her down
I run home and jumped into bed
A forty four smokeless under my head

“Little Sadie” is today known by a few other names, including Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues”, the more traditional “Bad Lee Brown”, and even the clinical and confusing “Bad Man Ballad” (thank you, John Lomax.)

It seems to have survived and flourished by easily crossing the boundary between black and white, rural and urban, low country and highland, as well as that between traditional and modern balladry.  It is, in short, the real deal – it’s “bona fide“.

Though its earliest origin is obscure – no one as yet has identified an historical murder as its inspiration – evidence strongly suggests that it began life in an African-American community in the south.  Yet, it translates effortlessly from blues to bluegrass, from old-time fiddle and banjo to folk revival guitar, and from the twang of classic country and the slash of post-modern rock to the a capella purity of the African-American proto-rap ‘Toast.’

Well, that’s a lot of ground to cover!  So, I’ll break this exploration into three posts.  Today we’ll take a longer look at the song’s roots and early life, and my bent will be more academic.  Next week my second and third posts will be shorter and more musical, and each will explore major modern branches of this song. We’ll see it becomes a country music classic in the next post, and in our last we’ll check out “Little Sadie” as a bluegrass standard and see where she’s walking today, musically and philosophically.

Music first, please?

Today’s post will be a bit short on recorded music, so stock up now!  Check out my Spotify playlist, in the neighborhood of 70 tracks and growing.  Of course, it doesn’t cover some of the earliest field recordings.  And I’ll mention some some other key recordings this week that are as yet unavailable on Spotify.  But there’s still plenty here, so dive in for a quick sample before we get to the history.  My personal favorite at the moment is number one on the list, by Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien.  Here are the lyrics.

Sharp’s observation at the bottom of his notes turns out to be quite an understatement; “Modern words – tune rather interesting.”  Of course, he couldn’t know in 1918 that this tune would would have such staying power into the 21st century.  And, using tools that were unavailable to Sharp, we can see rather clearly that even by the time he first ‘caught’ her in the Appalachians his “Satey” had been walking around the American south for a little while at least – maybe even decades.

So, let’s get started and see what we can turn up about it all then, shall we?

“Met my old woman…”  – Three Early Examples

Casual bluegrass aficionados might be surprised to know that this ballad is widely cited in secondary sources and in liner notes of various recordings as being of African-American origin.  Professor Jerry H. Bryant includes it as one of thirty “prototype” bad man ballads in his 2003 Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African-American Folklore and Fiction.  We can see such roots in the earliest primary source currently known.

Waltz and Engle’s Traditional Ballad Index has for this song, as usual, an informative entry.  The Wikipedia entry for “Little Sadie” relies heavily on it.  Malcolm Laws cataloged the song in his seminal Native American Balladry under its other common name, “Bad Lee Brown”, and called it item ‘I8’.  The Roud Folksong Index today calls it #780, with 25 citations.

Interestingly, following the citations in Roud leads one to identify an honest mistake in Waltz’s and Engle’s work for this song.  They cite the earliest printed example of the ballad as being collected in 1922, by Vance Randolph.  A quick look at that citation in Roud shows it was provided by one Miss Billie Freese of Joplin, Missouri, at the western edge of the Ozarks.  Yet, as I mentioned above, we have documentary evidence from Cecil Sharp of a collection in 1918, from Miss Sally Jones at St. Peter’s Mission in Franklin County, Virginia.  (Yes, you’re not alone – I just had a flashback to Songcatcher as well.)

Now, Randolph’s 1922 scrap from Missouri, on pp 117 of Vol II of his Ozark Folksongs, reads:

Last night I was a-makin’ my rounds,
Met my old woman an’ I blowed her down,
I went on home to go to bed,
Put my old cannon right under my head.

Jury says murder in the first degree
I says oh Lord, have mercy on me!
Old Judge White picks up his pen,
Says you’ll never kill no woman ag’in.

The lyrics are obviously similar to Sharp’s 1918 fragment from Virginia cited in the Introduction.  Yet there certainly seems to be the variance you’d expect from versions of a traditional ballad separated by 800 miles, particularly before the widespread availability of recorded music.

Without more information, in neither case can I identify the race of the singer for certain. Knowing what I do about Sharp’s and Randolph’s collecting in those times, I think both sources were likely white.  That’s a bit of a setback, but we’re okay – neither variant is the earliest documented!

The earliest written source cited in Roud seems to be from 1912, in a presentation delivered by Will H. Thomas to the Folklore Society of Texas titled Some Current Folk Songs of the Negro.  His century-old speech makes clear, in a way most distasteful today, that his sources for his lecture are entirely African-American.  He gathered the songs at the request of none other than John Lomax because, Thomas said, “as I was then devoting my summers to active farming where negroes were employed, I would, therefore, have an excellent opportunity for studying the negro and his songs.”  Now, in 1912 Thomas’s ‘subjects’ couldn’t have benefited from recordings or radio.  We can be reasonably sure then that his songs were collected authentically as local folk versions in the Brazos Valley of east Texas, the author’s career being at Texas A and M in College Station.

Let’s pick up his lecture part way through, as Thomas makes a pretentious academic joke at the expense of his black brothers and sisters.

“If any of you have high ideas about the universal sacredness of domestic ties, prepare to shed them now. It has often been said that the negro is a backward race. But this is not true. In fact, he is very forward. He had invented trial marriage before sociology was a science. The following songs are only too realistic: 

FIRST.

 

Though fragmentary, it’s clear this scrap from 1912 is a variant of the “Little Sadie” we know today. The same is true of the 1918 and 1922 fragments.  Now this post is already getting long and promises to get longer, so I’ll leave the analysis up to you.  Don’t take my word for it!  Use any modern version of the song’s lyrics as your starting point and I believe you’ll see both variety and overwhelming correspondence between it and these three scraps.

To my mind, they’re clearly scraps of the same ballad spread across the American south.  So, let’s map it out.

The points of collection between 1912 and 1922 are both geographically diverse and distant. Simply using the towns in the three states as vertices gives us a triangle that covers some 180,000 square miles, with Memphis and the Mississippi River roughly in the center.  Of course, oral tradition and the ‘folk process’ are hardly mathematical.  They have little to do with straight lines.

For an African-American ballad before the widespread use of radio and recordings, covering such distances meant rolling down rivers and spilling down countless farm roads and levee neighborhood streets – sometimes in a flood, and sometimes a trickle.  Either way, ten years is an unlikely amount of time to allow for *this much* geographical spread *and* lyric diversity in combination.

Taken all together then, this ballad strikes me more realistically as a product of the post-bellum African-American south, a contemporary perhaps of our St. Louis trio – “Frankie and Albert“, “Duncan and Brady“, and “Stagolee.”  Like those three songs, “Sadie” clearly has one foot in the Anglo ballad tradition; but like Doc Watson says, it’s got the blues too.  So my money for this one is on a late 19th century composition rather than an early 20th, and with its epicenter in a city on the Mississippi rather than the Brazos.  To be clear though, evidence thus far only gives us the triangle I mapped and the lyrics I cited above.  Whether the source was rural or urban is unclear at this point.  The setting and sophistication of the lyrics certainly suggest the latter, but remember that we as yet know of no historic murder at this song’s root.

Indeed, related to that last point you probably already noticed we are in the strange position of studying a powerful, popular murder ballad that almost always fails to ascribe even the simplest of motives to the killer!   The “Cocaine Blues” branch of the song that we’ll see in the second post is the only one to consistently make it clear.  “I thought I was her daddy but she had five more!”  Well, there’s that – plus the cocaine and whiskey.  This all seems to me to be an add-on; a rationalization or confabulation.  You’ll hear the prisoners at Folsom Pen howl and cheer when Johnny Cash delivers that line.

But the earliest scraps and the more developed lyrics from the 1930’s we’ll see below simply leave motive out of the picture.  “I met Little Sadie and I blowed her down…”  Why?  It just doesn’t matter, and that’s part of what gives this song its power.  Though Thomas pollutes his 1912 presentation with racism, our regular readers will recognize that his assessment of the song’s violence is accurate enough for *all* Americans in the city and the country – it is “all too realistic”.  Frankly, it could have come from East Texas or East St. Louis, or anywhere around or in between; in a sense, it comes from everywhere men do women wrong.

I’m not sure we can say anything more definitive on the subject of “Sadie’s” beginnings.  However, it’s worth noting that Wayne Erbsen, in his 1996 Outlaw Ballads, Legends and Lore says that “Bad Lee Brown” was in fact “popular around 1885.”  Here is the link to that page of his book, which also includes a full set of lyrics, as well as the chords and melody.  Erbsen is no amateur, as you can see from his website, so his assertion is worth consideration.  However, there is no footnote.  I asked him via email if he knew of the source.  He gave me a quick and gracious response, but he did that work almost two decades ago and he can’t recall.

It’s possible he was looking at Ozark Folksongs Vol II, pg 118, where Randolph includes a 1934 scrap from Springfield, Missouri provided by one Mr. Robert Kennedy, who claims the ballad was popular in Springfield 50 years earlier.  Obviously that’s not the kind of evidence upon which solid conclusions can be based, but it’s compelling.  So, even though I think 1885 is quite realistic, without any primary evidence at this point we’ll have to leave it as an open question.

But let’s at least close this section with Wayne Erbsen’s excellent version of “Bad Lee Brown.”

“I got a number instead of a name…” – Prison Blues

“Sadie” clearly found popularity with a diversity of both white and black singers early in the 20th century.  It is an outstanding example of a traditional murder ballad with porous racial boundaries, every bit as much as those in the more popular St. Louis trio mentioned above.  But for purposes of disambiguation, we’ll finish today by looking at its unique expression in the African-American tradition.  We’ll follow the entwined Anglo branch in the second and third posts next week.

I mentioned above that John Lomax gave this song the confusing title “Bad Man Ballad”.  He came up with this uninspired appellation early in the process of cataloging songs he collected on his trips to gather African-American music in the south during the Great Depression.  As far as I can tell from searching the Library of Congress, he collected a song he called by that name at least four times from African-American sources.

1. 1933 – from an unidentified “Negro Convict” at Parchman Farm in Mississippi.

2. 1935 – from a person nicknamed “Blue Heaven” in Belle Glade, Florida (a trip that featured Zora Neale Hurston as one of Lomax’s ‘recordists’.)

3. 1936 – from “Wendell Hart and a group of negro convicts” at the State Farm in Boykin, South Carolina

4. 1939 – from Willie Rayford, at Cummins State Farm near Gould, Arkansas

Now, I’ve lamented the fact in the past that it’s cost prohibitive for an amateur blogger to get sound recordings from the LOC.  So, we can’t hear all of these to verify that “Bad Man Ballad”, a term which can be taken as a general classification, refers specifically to our song of choice for the week.

However, luck is with us at least partially on this one.  Lomax transcribed the 1933 performance and included it in his 1934 American Ballads and Folk Songs.

Here are the pages from that book!  It is, clearly, “Little Sadie”.

Further, while we can’t easily access the two interim performances, we do in fact have a sound recording and transcription for the 1939 performance.

Here is the field recording, and here is the transcription.  Again, there’s no doubt that this is “Sadie”.

The two of which we’re sure tell us something.  They are prison blues – chain gang songs.  Further, the 1936 example is surely such a song and, though Lomax’s notes do not indicate it, Belle Glade was the site of the Florida Prison Farm #2, opened in 1932 – thus suggesting that the 1935 example is a prison blues as well.  So, though Lomax was not particularly noted for unwavering academic precision and attention to detail, it’s more than likely that the 1935 and 1936 recordings are the same song as well.

I delved in to the depth and meaning of prison blues and chain gang songs in Chapter Two of our exploration of “Stagolee.”  I don’t intend to repeat all that here.  But, if you’re unfamiliar with the genre and you don’t have time to read the other post, suffice it to say that those songs were psychic survival tools for black men facing a reality that was every bit as brutal and degrading as chattel slavery.  We know from Douglas A. Blackmon’s work that most black men in the southern prison system between the Civil War and World War II had done nothing wrong to land there, or otherwise received outrageously long sentences for minor infractions.  His evidence shows that most were arrested to provide free labor for local agriculture and industry.  As with other prison blues, and even older songs from the time of de jure slavery, “Sadie” sung in this context secretly declares for its singers that the system that keeps them in bondage is wholly corrupt.

Russell Ames wrote about it all – specifically including “Bad Lee Brown” as an example – in Science and Society in 1951, in his article “The Implications of Negro Folk Song.”

“The irony and disguise of folk song is not tricky but a social necessity – a tradition established to protect people from injury or death…  Much Negro song deals with the system of police, courts, and prison that is so present in the Negro mind and is so little thought about or understood by comfortable white Americans. If we would devote to these social songs one-thousandth of the time that we give to untangling a piece of montage that Pound or Eliot or Joyce has made out of his reading, we would find that the songs are more than they seem and we would learn much that is important about human beings and about America.”

Again, I’ll leave a detailed lyric analysis up to you. But let me get you started this time.  Simply pay attention to any line that deals with law, police, courts, and prison.  And remember that the criticism can’t be expressed openly.  Read between the lines.  For example, the jury is made up of “twelve honest men” who come back with a guilty verdict in five minutes!  Lines like these slide by unnoticed until one realizes the context.  Indeed, they find their way into today’s versions of “Sadie.”  But it wasn’t Merle Travis or Johnny Cash that gave them such vitality.  No, that came from black men who used such lines to survive the hardest of times, and whose numbers meant more than their names as far as their masters were concerned.

Coda – A Toast!

Interestingly, we have one more clear example of “Bad Lee Brown” in a uniquely African-American context – the Toast.  Jerry H. Bryant explores the toast in Chapter 6 of Born in a Mighty Bad Land, and I explored it in some depth in Chapter 3 of our digital compendium concerning Stagolee, titled “The Bucket of Blood“ (nsfw).  If you want to know about the direct roots of Rap, check those sources out to start.