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Even in this august context, Sophronie’s “Tragedy” stands out. The song is the only unaccompanied performance on The Watson Family, and for its duration a hush beyond silence seems to surround her solo voice. Sung when she was 76 and her sole recording, it’s the only murder ballad known to have been recorded by a central participant in the events it describes. And for five and a half minutes it seems to stop time.

At Marshall Triplett’s this begun
The brothers met, it seemed in fun
They drank together all as one
And then this trouble it begun

Sophronie Miller Greer: “The Triplett Tragedy” (1963)
The sound is stark, raw. The song lacks all aural niceties and demands full attention in an age of mass distraction. Its simple tune recalls both “Nottamun Town” (Roud 1044), the eerie medieval melody Bob Dylan borrowed for “Masters of War,” and Buell Kazee’s mournful reading of “The Butcher Boy” (Laud P24, Roud 409) – only sparer, more stripped down. For 14 verses its four-line structure, AABB rhyme scheme, and deliberate tempo never vary. The result is hypnotic, drawing you deeper into the song’s gradually unfolding narrative, line by line, fact by fact. Lyrics are similarly plain and direct – descriptive/utilitarian with just a dollop of pro-temperance sentiment and eschatological drama.

The voice is riveting. Aged and unlovely, it lacks the pleasant tone of similarly affectless but easier-on-the-ear primitives like Jean Ritchie or Ralph Stanley. Because she lived the events she recounts, the performance radiates authenticity. Conceptual distinctions between singer and “singer” collapse – vocalist and narrator merge, despite the ballad’s outside authorship. Strength and vulnerability fuse into stoic dignity, with pain clearly just below the surface. It sounds like she has waited all her life for this moment – to tell her story, share her truth with the world – suggesting that the song has been her companion for 50 years of remembering, grieving, and coping.

Then Marshall seemed to stand in the rear
And struck Columbus with a chair
“There is one thing that I do know
You drink only to save your own”

Ripped apart

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
— Genesis 9:10

The reports of the fearful tragedy are so diversified that it is indeed hard to get the straight of it.
— Watauga Democrat, Jan. 6, 1910

Columbus Triplett was born on Christmas Eve, 1852, the son of a farmer and Civil War veteran and his wife. Like countless other rural families at the turn of the 20th century, the Tripletts had been on their land for generations and their genealogy intertwines in complex, at times confounding ways with other local families. Lum’s brother Marshall, six years his junior, was born in 1859. Both men married young and raised families. Lum was 57 when he died; Marshall, 50. Their advanced ages are striking: fratricide is always shocking but perhaps less so in hotheaded youth.

Tamer Sophronia Miller was born in 1884 to a farmer/preacher and his wife. Her paternal grandfather was a fifer in the Confederate Army. Thirty-one years younger than Lum Triplett, she was his second wife. Lum had half a dozen grown children from his first marriage, all living in Texas in 1910. Widowed in 1904, he married Sophronie soon after. It’s unclear whether the couple had children: four months after her husband’s death, census records list Sophronie as the mother of one child, but no child lives with her.

Facts are slippery things, often inspiring as many questions as they answer. “The Triplett Tragedy” is based on relatively recent events, documented in print and public record, yet gulfs still open when one tries to flesh out its skeletal narrative or better comprehend its players’ actions. Both brothers died, so there was no trial or attendant investigation. Consequently, journalistic accounts from regional newspapers are critical sources of information.

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