Introduction

My first post this week introduced “Hiram Hubbard”, a Kentucky murder ballad from the era of the Civil War.  The performance of Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson was our springboard.  For the sake of avoiding multiple clicks across posts, I’ll share that version again with lyrics, as you may want to use it for comparison as things develop.

Lyrics (with introduction) from Ritchie’s song book

Along with Jean’s notes from her songbook and her introduction to the performance, we also heard her description of this murder ballad at a 2008 performance.

Added up, it all comes down to this.  Jean’s father told her he “gathered it up” from three or four folks who remembered bits of it, and that it was local; from Perry County, Kentucky.  She wrote that she’d only ever heard *him* sing it, so he is almost surely her source for the story that the song is about a travelling Union soldier who was “trapped behind the rebel lines” after the war in “enemy territory” and framed for a local murder.

As I point out in my first post, and I do so most respectfully to Jean and her family, this explanation doesn’t make sense. Kentucky, though a slave state, stayed in the Union during the war.  Kentucky’s western population was generally pro-Confederate.  But the people of eastern Kentucky tended greatly towards support for the Union. Slavery never took hold in the highland communities because of the geography there. As in the entirety of the south, where slavery did not exist in any significant way neither did secessionist sentiment.

East Kentucky was always Union territory, not only on the political map but in most locals’ hearts and minds as well. Further, there were  no “rebel lines” after the war.  Even if one could meaningfully call the conquered Confederacy “enemy territory”, it certainly didn’t include eastern Kentucky where the events in this song took place.  A great number of Union soldiers came from these counties; to frame one for murder simply because he wore the blue would be condemning family or neighbors.

They swore so hard against him…

What really happened then?  Thankfully, though Jean only knew of her father singing the song, there are earlier references we can consult to help us place it in proper context.

In A Syllabus of Kentucky Folksongs, from 1911, the description makes more sense.  “Hiram Hubbert is taken by the Rebels in the guerrilla warfare in the Cumberland Mountains, tried, tied to a tree, and shot. He leaves a last letter of farewell to his family.”  One of the scholars who wrote the syllabus included it in another work.  Josiah Combs’ 1925 Folk-Songs du Midi des Etas-Unis preserves nine stanzas of the song, and similarly he writes (translated from the French) “This song is an echo of the guerrilla warfare in the highlands during the Civil War.”

Though I haven’t yet found a copy of Combs’ work, Malcolm Laws‘ cites it in his classic Native American Balladry.  There the song gains its catalog number ‘Laws A20‘.  The Roud Folksong Index today calls it #2208, and catalogs twelve variants.

Laws’ description is more complete than those given above, and I suspect is based on the version of the song Combs collected.  “Hiram is captured by Rebels and is cruelly driven ahead of them to the Cumberland River.  There he is tried, and, after his captors have sworn against him, is condemned to death.  He writes a will in which he bids farewell to his family and friends and then is tied to a tree and shot dead.”

I found a relatively recent recording of the song by the duo Tammerlin (Lee Hunter and Arvid Smith) on their 2002 album Wind Horses.

Lyrics for  “Hiram Hubbert”

The lyrics follow exactly the story that Laws tells in his description, and provide a good deal more information than Ritchie’s version.  The musical arrangement is acoustic, though not traditional.  But lyrically it is almost certainly an older version of the ballad than the one Jean sings, particularly given the fact that she describes her father as reassembling the song from various local sources.

Now we have some specificity!  Hubbard was indeed “travelling through Kentucky.”  As well, his place of execution was the Cumberland River.  If these two things are true, then the ballad could be ‘local’ to eastern Kentucky, though not precisely Perry County.  Jean’s claim to the contrary likely rests entirely on her father’s interpretation. In this case, I trust the older version of the song.  Where and when, then?

Again, we can’t know without documentation and that’s not likely to surface; but I think I’ve got an idea.

They took him to Cumberland River…

Before my research this week I pegged the story to one of two specific times.  I thought it likely either from the winter of 1861-1862 when the Confederates had a military force in eastern Kentucky that was eventually driven out at the Battle of Mill Springs, or from early fall of 1862 during the Rebel invasion of Kentucky that ended with their retreat after the Battle of Perryville.  At either of those times, regular Confederate soldiers could have imposed something like a summary execution on a member of the local population in eastern Kentucky.  The area could rightly be described as “behind Rebel lines” then, as Ritchie says in her 2008 introduction.  In fact, both contexts could still be correct.

But there is another possibility; and the more I think on it, the more likely it seems.  If we discount completely the story that Jean Ritchie tells about it being “behind rebel lines”, then it might just be exactly what Combs described, “an echo of the guerrilla warfare in the highlands during the Civil War.” Guerrilla warfare sounds reasonable, but it’s not explicit in either version of the song. Is there other evidence?  Circumstantially, yes.

I ran across this research by Tom Des Jean and Nicholas Herrmann while looking for information about the song.  While the specific events it involves are clearly not the root of the narrative in the ballad, the introduction to the paper is most enlightening.  It’s one of those ‘hiding in plain sight’ keys.

“The people and the resources of the Upper Cumberland Plateau played no direct part in the War Between the States. However, that does not mean that the area did not remain untouched by the conflict that raged all around the Plateau and the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. Many of the men in the region went off to join the Union forces and enlisted at Camp Dick Robinson, south of Lexington, Kentucky. This vacancy left the home areas relatively vulnerable to attacks by ruthless gangs of deserters from both armies. These predatory gangs, often called “Rebels”, were in fact “irregulars”, or marauders, similar to the more notorious bands like Quantrill’s Guerillas and Morgan’s Raiders, that would plunder, pillage, and steal anything of value to them.”  (hypertext and boldface added)

Aha!  Here again we find that the meaning we derive from a ballad may in fact rest on one word, easily misinterpreted! ‘Rebels’ captured Hubbard; but it may be that ‘rebels’ meant more to folks in eastern Kentucky than simply ‘regular troops of the Confederacy.’  If we consider that in the context of this song the word probably refers to marauders or guerrillas, things really fall into place.

The rebels overhauled him…

“Rebel Bill” Smith, Champ Ferguson, Sue Mundy, ‘Stovepipe’ Johnson; the list goes on.  The story of Kentucky in the Civil War is very much that of the actions and depredations carried out by such leaders and their men.  Though I’ve never read much about it, a simple search turns up tales that range from humorous to outrageous, from noble to sickening. Hiram Hubbard’s story fits in this milieu much more so than in that of typical battles like Perryville and Mill Springs.  This is the Civil War as up close and personal as it got.

I did a quick search of the 1860 Census for eleven eastern Kentucky counties that touch on the upper Cumberland River.  Three of them (Wayne, Knox, and Whitely) had a total of thirty-eight folks with the family name Hubbard living in them.  None of them are listed as Hiram, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.  My point is that Hubbards lived near the upper Cumberland in Kentucky in 1860.

Champ Ferguson, one of the most infamous Confederate guerrillas, operated on the upper Cumberland throughout the war.  His band committed numerous depredations and acts of violence, particularly in Wayne County.  As he kept his band active, they took casualties there too; sometimes at the hands of the unionist civilians they targeted.  (Here’s a book I started to read about him and all this mess.)

Did someone falsely accuse Hiram Hubbard of bushwhacking one of these ‘rebels’ near the Cumberland River in eastern Kentucky, in Wayne County?  Did he die for a stranger’s crime, or a neighbor’s?  That’s certainly plausible, and thus far that’d be my best guess.  The song implies that a bushwack *did* happen, by offering the alibi that Hubbard was “ninety miles away”; no need for an alibi if the crime was never done.

Or was the accusation just a believable excuse for the ‘rebels’ to prey on another unionist civilian, taking his money, his shoes and his life under the pretense of military justice so as to clear their consciences (or at least the record) of guilt in a war crime?  It’s equally likely.  Ferguson was, in fact, convicted and hung for numerous murders of just this sort after the war.  I find no evidence of him murdering a Hubbard.  But he admitted to personally killing over a hundred men, often with a Bowie knife. We can’t know every victim.  (Did anyone else just get a shiver and remember Shaleane’s last week of posts?)

On the other hand, maybe Hubbard’s relatives or friends wrote the song to clear his name. Maybe he’d actually killed a ‘rebel’ in Ferguson’s or some other ‘rebel’ band.  A song usually lasts longer than a history book.  It’s just as believable.

Or maybe Dad Ritchie was right!  See, the Cumberland’s waters in Wayne County where those Hubbards lived are pretty much ninety miles from the heart of Perry County.  Maybe there’s much more to the story than meets the eye.

Unfortunately, here we are desolate.  We must speculate, without the benefit of even a shred of evidence.  It has to end somewhere then, eh?

Farewell my friends and neighbors…

Does any of this matter?  I guess that’s up to you…

Someone wrote this ballad to tell a specific story, to say something about a particular person in a certain time and place so that the people wouldn’t forget.  We can’t really know who.  Only a century and a half later, without that context, the best we can do is make educated guesses.  Where history ends, art takes over.  We may have lost the context, but the depth of human experience into which we’re thrown by this ballad is more meaningful anyway.

I love history.  But the humanity is why I sing this song.

Thanks for riding this far with me!