[In the following essay, Baker examines ballads associated with three lynchings in North Carolina and contends that, more than novels and poetry, folk music offers insight into attitudes toward lynching in the communities where they occurred.]

If, as if often claimed, lynchings have had profound effects on the communities in which they happened, those effects should be evident in the cultural productions of those communities. Although scholarship has begun to look at cultural productions concerning lynching, this attention to date has focused on “high culture” such as novels and poetry. These productions are rich, but they typically reflect sensibilities that may be distinct from those of communities in which lynchings occurred. To study cultural productions directly shaped by lynching, we need to concentrate on those which, although created by an individual, have been widely accepted in and have become part of the folklore of the community in which the lynching occurred. With this aim in mind, this essay focuses on ballads associated with three lynchings that occurred in the lower Piedmont of North Carolina just north and east of Charlotte between 1892 and 1906. These ballads were a vital part of the communities' own construction of the meanings of these lynchings, and without understanding their role within the folk culture of lynching, we cannot fully appreciate the cultural context in which the lynchings occurred.¹

Ballads have long been an important area of study within American folklore scholarship. Francis J. Child's monumental collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published between 1882 and 1888, is often regarded as the birth of American folkloristics. Later, Cecil Sharp's discovery of English ballads still being sung in the southern Appalachians paved the way for still more collecting and study. By mid-century, the trend was toward classification and study of themes within ballads. G. Malcolm Laws helped bring the focus of ballad studies from Britain to America with his 1950 book Native American Balladry. In the past two decades, there have been important studies of railroad songs and murdered-girl ballads. But to date, only scanty attention has been given to ballads about lynchings. Aside from a couple of articles in the North Carolina Folklore Journal on two of the ballads discussed in this essay and a passing mention in Alan Lomax's memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, folklorists have left preservation of lynching ballads and commenting on them to journalists and historians.²

Lynching ballads are one important part of what I call the “folk culture of lynching.” By this I mean expressive texts broadly conceived in traditional forms which have as their subject a specific lynching or lynchings in general and which become traditional within a given group or region. The folk culture of lynching encompasses a wide variety of texts. The forms of these texts among any given group depend on the forms traditional to it. Thus legendary accounts of lynchings are part of the folk culture of lynching in nearly every area where lynchings occurred, but fiddle tunes commemorating lynchings, for example, may be found only where there already exists a tradition of fiddle playing. In addition to legendary accounts and fiddle tunes, we can include haunt tales, place names, customary behavior, souvenirs, and ballads among the forms of the folk culture of lynching.³

Studying lynching ballads is important because it offers a glimpse into the process by which the social memory of a lynching is constructed. Since these ballads tended to be local in composition and circulation, local social hierarchies and local aesthetics influenced the form the composition took and the style in which it was written. Once written, the ballad and the values expressed in it would have been compared to the values held by the majority of the members of the community. Obviously, ballads that espoused widely held values would stand a greater chance of being sung and remembered over longer periods of time. Lynching ballads, then, provide the opportunity to listen to the voices of those who were directly involved in the social structures that gave rise to lynchings, the people who knew both the mob and the victim and felt compelled to sing that knowledge in ballads. Although use of folkloric sources is more methodologically problematic than use of traditional historical scholarship based on newspaper accounts or court documents, the insights yielded by study of folk material overshadow any hesitancy over its validity.

The existence of a folk culture of lynching reminds us that when we conceive of a lynching we need to think of more than just a sequence of events in which a mob puts a person or persons to death. We need to think of lynching as a cultural text made up of many elements operating on different levels. The event sequence, like the other elements, is a stylized action laden with meaning which is intended to convey a message to various audiences. This metaphor of the lynching as a text, that is, of many different elements each contributing to the propagation of messages, allows us to see the cultural expressions about lynchings, whether in novels, newspapers, or ballads, as a part of the lynching.

One feature of lynching ballads is that, like most other American ballads, they tend to be “accurate enough in detail to permit an investigator to demonstrate positively their factual basis.” This characteristic is most evident in the nearly universal use of accurate personal names, a trait shared by the North Carolina lynching ballads as well as such other lynching ballads as “In a Little Country Schoolyard,” “Emmet Till,” “The Ashland Tragedy,” and “The Strayhorn Mob.” This documentary quality serves to maintain the memory of the event and the participants in the folk culture of the community in which the ballad was composed and sung. The use of specific names in lynching ballads, moreover, serves as a marker of the power relationships involved. The victim's name reminds listeners of the crime and warns them to avoid a similar fate. Since the mob is nameless, using the name of the victim while not mentioning the names of the mob reinforces the power conferred by anonymity. Lynch law, while applied at a specific point, draws its power to terrorize in large part from the uncertainty of the identity of mob members: anyone could be a potential lyncher, just as anyone could be a potential lynching victim. This representational function of lynching ballads is evident in four lynching ballads from North Carolina.⁴

EMMA HARTSELL

One extant North Carolina ballad recounts events that follow the archetypal pattern for a southern lynching: a white girl was raped and murdered, and suspicion fell on two black men, with lethal results. The murder of Emma Hartsell, a twelve-year-old white girl, and the subsequent lynching of Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer in Concord, North Carolina, in 1898 inspired a ballad, “The Death of Emma Hartsell,” which has circulated among singers, journalists, and folklorists for nearly a century.

The outlines of the murder and lynching that became the basis for the ballad may be quickly sketched. On May 29, 1898, the Hartsell family went to church, leaving an infant daughter at home in Emma's care. When they returned around five o'clock, they found Emma dead on the kitchen floor, “her head nearly severed from her body.” A local doctor examined the corpse and declared that she had been raped. A search party formed to hunt down the killers, and suspicion came to rest on two black men, Tom Johnson and Joe Kizer. When the sheriff placed them in the Concord jail around seven o'clock, the search party followed him to the jail and demanded that he turn the prisoners over. The sheriff refused, and the mob assaulted the jail, knocking in the front door and seizing Johnson and Kizer. The mob took the pair down the Mt. Pleasant road about a mile and a half out of town before finding a dogwood tree suitable for the hanging. A minister who had tried to convince the mob of two thousand people not to lynch Johnson and Kizer spoke to the prisoners, and then they were hanged. After the hanging, the mob fired several hundred rounds into the corpses. Spectators took souvenirs, including the rope, parts of the tree limbs, and various articles of clothing (but not body parts). The next morning, a court of inquest visited the scene, and “their verdict, of course, was nothing more than a formal report as is required.”⁵

The ballad, “The Death of Emma Hartsell,” which has been collected in several variants, preserved an oral record of these events.

(1)          In eighteen hundred and ninety eight
                    Sweet Emma met with an awful fate.
                    'Twas on the holy Sabbath day
                    When her sweet life was snatched away.
(2)          It set my brain all in a whirl
                    To think of that poor little girl.
                    Who rose that morning fair and bright,
                    And before five was a mangled sight.
(3)          It caused many a heart to bleed
                    To think and hear of such deed.
                    Her friends, they shed many a tear.
                    Her throat was cut from ear to ear.
(4)          Just as the wind did cease to blow,
                    They caught the men, 'twas Tom and Joe.
                    The sheriff he drove in such a dash
                    The howling mob could scarcely pass.
(5)          They got to town by half past seven
                    Their necks were broken before eleven.
                    The people there were a sight to see.
                    They hung them to a dogwood tree.
(6)          Fathers and mothers a warning take
                    Never leave your children for God's sake
                    But take them with you wherever you go
                    And always think of Tom and Joe.
(7)          Kind friends we all must bear in mind
                    They caught the men who did the crime.
                    There's not a doubt around the lurk
                    Tom said he held her while Joe did the work.
(8)          Sweet Emma has gone to a world of love
                    Where Tom and Joe dare not to go.
                    We think they've gone to hell below
                    For treating poor little Emma so.
(9)          Dear friends we all remember this
                    That Emma will be sadly missed.
                    And one thing more I also know
                    This world is rid of Tom and Joe.
(10)      As they stood on death's cold brink
                    Joe Kizzer [sic] begged the man for drink
                    No drink no drink the man replied.
                    To Hell to Hell your soul must fly.
(11)      And one thing more my song does lack
                    I forgot to say the men were black.
                    Her friends and neighbors will say the same
                    And Emma Hartsell was her name.

Certain features of the text of “The Death of Emma Hartsell” shed light on the way people in the eastern Cabarrus and western Stanly area recalled this event. Some of these features are common throughout the genre of lynching ballads. The last line of verse 7, “Tom said he held her while Joe did the work,” is reminiscent of the stories and “rumors of rape” which Jacquelyn Dowd Hall claims “became a kind of acceptable folk pornography … a public fantasy that implies a kind of group participation in the rape of the woman almost as cathartic as the subsequent lynching of the alleged attacker.” Interestingly, none of the contemporary newspaper accounts of the lynching include the “begging for water” scene from verse 10. The only mentions of it in print are long after the fact. In the Concord Daily Standard, however, the correspondent reported that the lynch mob with their prisoners turned off the main road at Big Cold Water Hill, suggesting that perhaps the name of the location of the hanging got incorporated into the lore of the lynching as an event rather than a name.⁶

Anne Cohen observed in her study of “Poor Pearl,” a murder ballad, that although both ballads and newspaper accounts of the murder of Pearl Bryan drew on certain set formulas for characterization and other features, “there can be little doubt that composers of Pearl Bryan ballads got their information about the case from news stories,” and there is strong textual evidence to suggest a similar influence in “The Death of Emma Hartsell.” In the account of the murder and lynching that appeared in the Concord Daily Standard, we read that Tom Johnson confessed that “he held the girl, but that Kizer did the work,” just as verse 7 states. The sheriff had to drive through a “howling mob” in both the newspaper account and the ballad. Describing Emma's body, the newspaper writes, “It was soon found that the back of her neck was cut from ear to ear.” In the ballad, “Her throat was cut from ear to ear.” Thus the ballad recorded for subsequent audiences and generations details that would form the folk memory of the lynching.⁷

Surprisingly, race is not explicitly discussed in the ballad until the last verse. Almost certainly, this is because of the popular conception of rape and lynching at the turn of the century: all rape victims were white, pure, and frail, and all rapists were big and black. When race is mentioned in the last verse, it is as an afterthought: “And one thing more my song does lack / I forgot to say the men were black.” Since “The Death of Emma Hartsell” was originally composed as a poem and later set to music, its identification as a “song” in this verse suggests that the final verse was added later, perhaps by the same person who set the poem to music. If this was the case, it seems plausible that the author of the final verse chose to designate the race of Tom and Joe and include Emma's surname for listeners who may not have been familiar with the details of the incident. The poem's original local audience, of course, would have known these essential details.

“The Death of Emma Hartsell” has a plot device common to lynching ballads: a request by the lynching victim followed by the rejection of that request by the mob. The tenth verse of “The Death of Emma Hartsell” involve a request and its denial, in this case for water:

As they stood on death's cold brink
Joe Kizzer [sic] begged the man for drink.
No drink no drink the man replied.
To Hell to Hell your soul must fly.

The request/denial device is also used in the ballad “J. V. Johnson,” in which Johnson asks, “Oh, just give me one moment to pray,” but is answered, “You did not give Guinn time to pray. / … / We will not give you time to pray.” Subsequently, his request for mercy is refused as well. The motif of a request for mercy is also found in the Mississippi lynching ballad “Emmet Till.” The request and its denial convey graphically the power of the mob to make life-and-death decisions about the victim as well as to control minute details.

In the text of “The Death of Emma Hartsell,” we find much sentiment and sensationalism but little sympathy. This characteristic is typical of most lynching ballads. They tend to sentimentalize the victim of the precipitating crime and demonize the lynching victim but extend true sympathy to no one. Although the influence of sentimental parlor songs on the composers of lynching ballads may partially explain this trait, it is also rooted in attitudes toward the social relationships that led to lynchings. Emma is sentimentalized as “a poor little girl … bright and fair,” but she is portrayed more as an object than as a person. The second verse, after describing Emma, concludes by calling her “a mangled sight.” Similarly, the next verse focuses less on Emma's experience than on the external perception of that experience as spectacle. After discussing the reaction of Emma's friends and family to the “mangled sight,” the poem gives another snapshot of the corpse, in this case reminding us that “her throat was cut from ear to ear.” Unlike many murdered-girl ballads in which the victim carries on a dialogue with her assailant, Emma never speaks, never cries, and exists only as a mute victim, an object to be either assaulted, protected, or avenged. Tom and Joe, likewise, are portrayed in a sensational manner. Verse 6 presents them as bogeymen, warning parents to “always think of Tom and Joe.” The judgment expressed in verse 8, “We think they've gone to hell below,” portrays them as beyond the pale of Christian sympathy and presumes to judge their souls. This banishment to hell is repeated in verse 10, when a man tells Joe, “To Hell to Hell your soul must fly.” Like Emma, Tom and Joe are mute, except for Joe's request for a drink, which is not expressed as a direct quotation.

Another feature of some of the lynching ballads is a concern with the eternal judgment upon the lynching victim. In “The Death of Emma Hartsell,” this judgment is explicit:

Sweet Emma has gone to a world of love
Where Tom and Joe dare not to go.
We think they've gone to hell below
For treating poor little Emma so.

The mob has removed the victim from this world, and the ballad claims to know where the victim is going afterward. By contrast, the question of judgment is left open in “J. V. Johnson,” where he wonders in each of the last two verses, “My soul, what will become of thee?” Likewise, “In a Little Country Churchyard” ends with a general admonition to “Pray to get right with your master / Before it is too late.”⁸

In many ways, “The Death of Emma Hartsell” is the most typical lynching ballad. It provides a representational account of the lynching of two black men for the rape and murder of a white girl, and the way the account is rendered reinforces the attitudes about the social relationships that gave rise to the lynching. Significantly, the ballad presents none of the factors affecting race relations in Concord at that time—the Spanish-American War, the emergence of the first textile mill owned and operated by blacks, and the racially charged white supremacy campaign of 1898 that culminated in the Wilmington riots of October. This simplified version of events is to some extent an effect of the ballad form itself. Whereas other oral accounts of the lynching may be modified by the speaker according to changing performance situations, the ballad, with its constraints of rhyme and meter, must be related in a more stable form, making it more difficult to adapt it to different performance contexts. Likewise, the stable form aids memory by giving the singer a framework for the details of the story. Thus lynching ballads like “The Death of Emma Hartsell” tend to resist changes in content over time more than other oral accounts less constrained by form.⁹

ALEC WHITLEY

The story of the lynching of Alec Whitley differs substantially from the lynching in Concord in 1898, and the ballads about the lynchings differ as well. Alec Whitley, unlike Joe Kizer and Tom Johnson, was white and a member of an established family. He had, however, a reputation and record of violent crime when a mob lynched him in Albemarle, Stanly County, in 1892. The ballads about Alec Whitley express not racial conflict but a communal sense of outrage and satisfaction that a dangerous element had been removed from society.¹⁰

Whitley was the illegitimate son of Christian Burris, a Confederate veteran, and Susanna Whitley, a member of a prominent local family. Alec grew from a troubled boy into a troublesome man, drinking, fighting, and stealing. He was tried for larceny in 1883 and 1885. Whitley's brother-in-law Bud Cagle was indicted along with him and turned state's evidence in the 1883 trial. Cagle disappeared, and there were suspicions that Whitley either killed him or chased him out of the area. Whitley's history becomes vague at this point, but after the death of his wife, Mary, and their children from natural causes, Whitley migrated to Arkansas in 1888 with his half-sister, Judy Burris, accompanying him as his wife. Another Stanly County native, Burt Tucker, followed in 1890.

In early 1892, Whitley argued with Tucker and killed him, dismembering the body and throwing it in a nearby creek. Accounts of the murder vary, attributing its cause to either a gambling dispute, jealousy over Burris, or Tucker's threat to tell the authorities about an earlier killing committed by Whitley. Whitley apparently tried to hide the murder by making it look as though Tucker had merely moved away. Two months passed before the discovery of Tucker's body. Meanwhile, Whitley and Burris traveled east toward North Carolina, parting company in Georgia. The sheriff in Arkansas put out a reward for Whitley, and the Stanly County sheriff was on the lookout for him.

Whitley arrived in Stanly County early in June and met his death less than two weeks later. A posse captured Whitley while he was hiding on his cousin's farm. The sheriff placed Whitley in jail to await the arrival of the sheriff from Arkansas, who would escort him back to stand trial there. Early on the morning of June 9, 1892, a mob of seventy-five to one hundred “disguised bloody shirt men” overpowered the sheriff and carried Whitley from the jail. The mob took him to the edge of town and hanged him from a red oak tree. Even impending death failed to rattle Whitley, who refused to confess to Tucker's murder and claimed that Bud Cagle was still living somewhere in South Carolina.

The powerful emotions provoked by Whitley and his lynching have been remembered by some area residents in song.¹¹ One of these was a ballad composed by a Baptist minister, Rev. Edmond P. Harrington.

“LINES WRITTEN ON THE ASSASSINATION OF D. B. TUCKER”

(1)          Come, young man of the present age, and listen
                         to my call,
                    And don't be overtaken by strong alcohol,
                    There was a man both young and gay, his name
                         to you I'll tell,
                    It was Burton Tucker, of whom you know so
                         well.
                    Chorus
                    They dumped him in water,
                    The fish swam o'er his breast,
                    The water in gentle motion,
                    We hope his soul's at rest.
(2)          Times were financially hard, and money coming
                         slow,
                    He went to the West where many young men go.
                    He went to his employment which was teaching
                         school,
                    His scholars, they all loved him, and all obeyed
                         his rules.
(3)          He only taught eight months instead of teaching
                         ten,
                    When he met with Aleck Whitley, who brought
                         him to his end.
                    Yes, he met with Aleck Whitley, all in a smile
                         you see,
                    “Go home with me Cousin Burton, and get your
                         lodging free.”
(4)          And after long persuading with him he did agree.
                    He went along home with him where murder
                         was to be.
                    Alex says to Wilson, “We've got him now you
                         see,
                    We will take his life and his money will ours
                         be.”
(5)          Yes, Aleck watched him close to see that he was
                         not seen.
                    He raised the fatal weapon and the blood ran
                         down in a stream.
                    Judy said to Aleck, “Don't this take the lead.”
                    They took him in the back room and laid him on
                         the cotton seed.
(6)          The like in old Arkansas had never yet been
                         seen,
                    They cut his body in pieces, the number of
                         seventeen.
                    Aleck says to Judy, “This secret you must keep.”
                    They cut his body in pieces and dumped it in the
                         creek.
(7)          Judy says, “Oh, Aleck, you'll die in public sure,
                    For murdering Cousin Burton, and mangling his
                         body so.
                    You'll be arrested for this, and in the jail you'll
                         go
                    And on the fatal hangman's tree, you'll pay the
                         debt you owe.”
(8)          His wife in North Carolina she could not take
                         her rest.
                    She felt that there was trouble with her husband
                         in the West.
                    Oftimes she had looked for him, and oftimes
                         seen him come,
                    But now he is gone from her to never more
                         return.

The textual genealogy of “Lines” demonstrates how folk cultural forms were adapted to create a folk culture of lynching. In composing “Lines,” Harrington drew upon styles of sentimental balladry then current to adapt an older Anglo-American ballad to recount an event of great local interest. Folklorists Roger D. Abrahams and George Foss suggest that “the addition of a chorus” is “a tendency discernible in sentimental songs” and that typically “a song which has a chorus-verse arrangement uses the chorus as the most extreme expression of the emotional involvement of the situation.” Such is certainly the case in “Lines,” where the chorus reminds the listener of the gruesome fact of Tucker's dismemberment after each verse. The chorus itself is clearly modeled on a verse from “Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low,” a Child ballad that circulated widely in North Carolina. Harrington, who was a preacher, storyteller, and composer and singer of ballads, found an apt model for his composition in “Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low.” In that ballad, Edwin gets drunk and is murdered for his money by the father of his lover, Emily. In “Lines,” Tucker, succumbing to “strong alcohol,” is murdered by Whitley for his money and possibly out of jealousy over Judy, setting up a familiar triangular relationship among the protagonists. Like Emily, Judy is pressured to be an accomplice and hush up the affair. The ballad closes with a conversation between Emily and her father. She tells him, “you'll die a public show,” leading Harrington to have Judy warn Alec, “you'll die in public sure.” “Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low” is more moralistic than most other Child ballads, making it more appropriate as a model for the sort of sentimental song warning against the dangers of alcohol that Harrington was writing.¹²

One of the most prominent details in this case is the dismemberment of Tucker. Every account, especially oral ones, mentions this fact.¹³ Dismemberment seems to hold a morbid fascination. While a corpse is still human, dismemberment violates the integrity of the body, questioning whether the corpse is actually human or only disassembled flesh. “Lines” also highlights this concern with dismemberment. The sixth verse says, “They cut his body in pieces, the number of seventeen,” and then repeats, “They cut his body in pieces and dumped it in the creek.” In the next verse, when Judy panics, she indicates that Whitley's punishment will be as much for this dehumanizing act as for the murder itself, saying, “Oh, Aleck, you'll die in public sure, / For murdering Cousin Burton, and mangling his body so.”¹⁴

Curiously, this ballad about the murder made no mention of the eventual fate of Alec Whitley other than to predict that “on the fatal hangman's tree, you'll pay the debt you owe.” The fact that the ballad focuses on the murder of Tucker and only alludes to the equally sensational lynching of Whitley leads me to believe that Harrington wrote this ballad between the time news of Tucker's death reached North Carolina newspapers and June 9, 1892, when a mob lynched Whitley.

The ballad, if Harrington composed it during this time, was probably written for distribution at Whitley's execution. John Harrington Cox in Folk-Songs of the South describes this custom in his discussion of a Kentucky ballad, “The Ashland Tragedy.” Elijah Adams had composed this ballad about a murder, lynching, and execution in 1884 in Ashland, Kentucky. According to a witness at the execution, “Lige Adams had a stack of ballads on the day of the hanging, stood on a big rock, and sold them as fast as three men could hand them out.” Similarly, James A. Turpin writes that verses of the ballad “Frankie Silver” “were printed on a strip of paper and sold to people who assembled at Morganton to see Frances Silver executed.” There is evidence that “Lines Written on the Assassination of D. B. Tucker” had a similar use. Broadsides served as aids to singers' memories and also as a means of distributing and preserving information about events. Hangings particularly had been accompanied by broadside ballads for several hundred years in England, the crowd of spectators providing an accessible and interested market for the ballad seller.¹⁵

The last stanza of “Lines” bears closer examination, for it holds an important clue to the development of the other ballad about Alec Whitley.

His wife in North Carolina she could not take her rest.
She felt that there was trouble with her husband in the West.
Oftimes she had looked for him, and oftimes seen him come,
But now he is gone from her to never more return.

The supernatural element of Tucker's wife presciently knowing of her husband's trouble is unusual in American balladry. What makes the supernatural element especially interesting in this case is that the first verse of the ballad dealing with the lynching, “Alec Whitley,” echoes this motif in a condensed form.

He murdered Bert Tucker in the West,
He murdered Bert Tucker in the West,
He murdered Bert Tucker in the West,
And he knocked a widder out of rest.

In a sense, the first verse of “Alec Whitley” provides a synopsis of “Lines” before continuing the story. Because of the general rarity of supernatural elements in American balladry and the similarity between the two verses, it appears that the composer of “Alec Whitley” was familiar with “Lines” and used the idea of its last verse as a starting point for a ballad memorializing the lynching.¹⁶

This second ballad about Alec Whitley, focusing on his lynching, exists in the form of two fragments and one complete variant collected by Heath Thomas, a journalist writing for the Salisbury (N.C.) Post.

“ALEC WHITLEY”

(1)          He murdered Bert Tucker in the West,
                    He murdered Bert Tucker in the West
                    He murdered Bert Tucker in the West
                    And he knocked a widder out of rest.
(2)          So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle,
                    So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle,
                    So they carried Alec Whitley to Albemarle,
                    And they made a prisoner of him there.
(3)          He stayed there three days and two nights,
                    He stayed there three days and two nights,
                    He stayed there three days and two nights,
                    And they hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb.
(4)          They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb,
                    They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb,
                    They hung Alec Whitley to a red oak limb,
                    Just to show the world what they'd do for him.
(5)          It was about the tenth of June,
                    It was about the tenth of June,
                    It was about the tenth of June,
                    When they hung that cunning old coon.

“Alec Whitley” is a fairly straightforward narrative account of the lynching. The structure of the verse form, based on the camp-meeting song “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” limited the creativity of the ballad because there were only two lines per stanza, and these lines had to rhyme. The constraints of rhyme help explain the ballad's most puzzling line, in which Whitley is described as a “cunning old coon.” The word “coon” could refer to Whitley's race, but it is more likely that the composer, eager to preserve the date of the lynching in his ballad, merely grabbed for a handy rhyme to “June.”

The two ballads about Alec Whitley's crime and lynching evince an active representation of lynching in folk culture. Along with legends, these ballads allowed the residents of Stanly County to preserve a readily accessible account of these terrible events and, more than just the events, the emotions they evoked. The ballads, composed around the time of the lynching, display horror and hatred over Tucker's murder and a smug satisfaction at Whitley's lynching. Today, however, the whole affair provokes mostly embarrassment and shame in Stanly County residents. The ballads, then, leave us a trace of the original emotional climate surrounding Whitley's lynching. Without condoning the lynching, by hearing the ballads we are nevertheless able to understand the power of the emotions of community members which led to the lynching.

J. V. JOHNSON

Sharp class differences separated J. V. Johnson and his brother-in-law, Guinn Johnson, the man for whose murder he was lynched. The story of Guinn Johnson begins with his father, Hugh Johnson, “a large landowner of Morven township,” whose lands were described as a “plantation.” J. V. Johnson's father, Daniel P. Johnson, in contrast, could be characterized as one of the “yeomen” who “owned only modest amounts of land.” In 1896, J. V. Johnson married Marcia Johnson, the daughter of Hugh Johnson, and settled in Morven, in southern Anson County, where he worked on Hugh's plantation.¹⁷

It is not clear just when the trouble arose between J. V. Johnson and his wife's family which would eventually lead to two deaths. Sometime in the spring of 1905, J. V., who had been drinking, assaulted Hugh and Tom Johnson, Hugh's eldest son, with a pistol and spent two months in a “private hospital at Morganton to be cured of the drink habit.” Court records show that on May 9, 1905, two doctors committed J. V. to the state hospital in Morganton, writing that he was “dangerous to himself and the community.” Tom Johnson swore out a peace warrant against J. V. when he returned from Morganton, and J. V. decided to move out of North Carolina. But he apparently changed his mind and stayed.¹⁸

Relations between J. V. and Guinn worsened during the summer and fall of 1905, culminating in Guinn's death at J. V.'s hands on December 27, 1905. J. V. Johnson was arraigned on the charge of first-degree murder on January 15, 1906, and his trial began on April 18, 1906. The final vote of the jury was eleven for second-degree murder and one for acquittal. The presiding judge declared a mistrial, and the trial was rescheduled for July 16, 1906. This turn of events heightened feelings that justice was neither swift nor certain enough.

Frustration over the slow pace and uncertain outcome of justice in Johnson's case led to his lynching on the night of Sunday, May 27, 1906. According to a farmer from Morven who later turned state's evidence, a mob, numbering between 75 and 125, made its way through Morven to the jail at Wadesboro. Johnson was taken out of town toward Morven and hanged from a pine tree on the right side of the road. After hanging him, the mob fired well over a hundred rounds into Johnson's corpse.

Reaction to the lynching was swift and strong but ultimately ineffective. The next morning the coroner impaneled a jury and investigated the lynching. The solicitor began an investigation immediately and telephoned Governor Robert Glenn to request that a special term of court be held to try the lynchers, although no convictions were made. The lynching was noted in the regional Biblical Recorder and two decades later made a brief appearance on the national scene in the form of an article in World's Work, which used the Wadesboro lynching as a point of departure for a commentary on lynching in general. But Johnson's lynching was soon lost among a flurry of other lynchings that summer and, in September, race riots in Atlanta. Around Wadesboro, however, J. V. Johnson's lynching was remembered and its story incorporated into a ballad, probably written by a Wadesboro merchant, which survived at least sixty years in oral tradition and is different in some important ways from the other lynching ballads discussed in this essay.¹⁹

“J. V. JOHNSON”

(1)          'Twas on a gloomy Sunday night
                    When Johnson thought he was alright
                    A hundred hearts of an angry mob
                    Did disobey the laws of God
(2)          'Twas on land[?] at half past two.
                    The great fair[?] doors the men broke through.
                    They scarcely [—?] for this poor man.
                    The cell was opened at their command.
(3)          Into the cell they boldly went,
                    And only there a moment spent.
                    “Come out, come out, your time has come
                    When you'll repay the deed you've done.”
(4)          “Don't hurt me boys,” he sadly said.
                    “Hush, hush your mouth—you'll soon be dead.”
                    “Oh, just give me one moment to pray,
                    And do not kill a man who prays.”
(5)          “You did not give Guinn time to pray.
                    You took his dear sweet life away.
                    We will not give you time to pray,
                    But for his life your life shall pay.”
(6)          That was a sad and awful time.
                    Just as they reached the fatal time.
                    A rope around his neck they tied,
                    And hung the man until he died.
(7)          “I know the crime is awful black.
                    I wish that I could call it back.
                    It is so dark I cannot see.
                    My soul, what will become of thee?”
(8)          “Farewell, this world, my friends, my wife.
                    This mob will surely take my life.
                    It is so dark I cannot see.
                    My soul, what will become of thee?”

The most striking thing about the melody to which “J. V. Johnson” was sung is that it is nearly identical to the melody of “The Death of Emma Hartsell.” The first phrase is identical; the second phrase differs in only two notes; the third phrase shares the same cadence tones; the fourth phrase is identical. These similarities, added to the fact that both ballads deal with a similar event, strongly indicate that the composer of “J. V. Johnson” modeled his song on “The Death of Emma Hartsell.” This is not surprising, if we consider that Marshville, where the likely composer of “J. V. Johnson” had friends, is within nineteen miles of Oakboro, where “The Death of Emma Hartsell” circulated until at least the late 1920s. This transmission is further evidence for the rich folk culture of lynching in the North Carolina Piedmont at this time.²⁰

“J. V. Johnson” carefully criticizes the lynching through use of religious references, diction, and the distribution of voice among the characters in the ballad. Verses 4 and 5 use the plot device of a request and its denial. While this suggests the mob's merciless attitude toward Johnson, it is references to religion that give “J. V. Johnson” much of its affective power as a statement against lynching. The first verse claims that the mob “did disobey the laws of God.” In addition to disobeying God's laws, the mob refuses Johnson even the comfort of prayer before death. This refusal leads to Johnson's concern with the disposition of his soul expressed in the last two verses. The narrator is clearly against the lynching, as demonstrated by his diction. He describes Johnson as a “poor man” who addresses his assailants “sadly,” and the moment of his death is a “sad and awful time.” Finally, and most surprising in a lynching ballad, Johnson, not the narrator or the mob, is given the final word. The ballad could logically end after the sixth verse; Johnson's two-verse coda, repeating its pitiful refrain, leaves the listener with the voice of the condemned man, the voice the lynching tried to silence.

The practice of lynching existed on a social landscape in which power and social relationships were being contested on a variety of fronts, and the folklore of lynchings offers a unique perspective on the meanings and functions of lynching ballads. Like other forms of expression, ballads became part of a struggle for power over the representation of lynchings. In a New South concerned with progress, condemnations of lynching are not hard to find; governors' speeches, religious publications, newspaper editorials, and many other voices called for an end to the practice. Likewise, contemporary justifications for lynching abound and in many of the same forms. What distinguishes folkloric forms, such as the lynching ballads discussed here, is that they were part of the discourse of the very communities in which the lynchings occurred. Rather than defending a lynching from outsiders' attacks or condemning those who took part in a lynching, these ballads express the feelings and observations of the people most directly affected by a particular lynching and preserve an account of the event giving their point of view.

INTERPRETING LYNCHING BALLADS

When interpreting lynching ballads, we do well to begin with G. Malcolm Laws's concise definition of a ballad as “a narrative folksong which dramatizes a memorable event.” First, there is a bounded event which is a matter of historical record. Second, there is a representation of that event which, by means of language, presents that which is absent, the event itself. Hence, to answer the question, What does this ballad mean? we must interrogate the relationship between the event and the representation. We might interpret lynching ballads in the so-called New Critical mode, considering only their technical and formal perfection. Or, by analyzing both the event and the representation, we might view “the ballad as a record of fact.” In this approach, the event is construed as containing objective truth, and it is the task of the representation to reflect this truth as accurately as possible.²¹

Problems arise, however, when ballads are narrowly conceived as records of facts. All too often, the subject matter of balladry, the “facts” themselves, are a matter of contestation. The ballad often has a tactical function which is at least as important as its representational or documentary task.²² Rather than reflecting a static event, the ballad engages the event, becoming an active factor in an ongoing attempt to define the “facts” of the event. The difference and distance between representation and event are collapsed when the representation attempts to affect the event. This is most clearly seen when the event involves a factionalized society, as does a battle or a lynching.

Familiar traditions of balladry in the southern labor movement and the Irish rebellion of the nineteenth century are conspicuous examples of the role of the tactical folksong. In the early days of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) in the Arkansas delta, a union member named Frank Weems was beaten and left for dead. John Handcox, the troubadour of the STFU, composed a ballad, “The Man Frank Weems,” about the incident, and it was used along with many others as part of organizing campaigns, strikes, and other forms of protest. Looking at this situation schematically, we see that a given social order (the plantation system of cotton production in the 1930s Arkansas delta and resistance to it led by the STFU) led to an event (the beating of Frank Weems) that was represented in Handcox's ballad, and the representation was used tactically to affect the social order (in strikes). Likewise, the singing of seditious ballads in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland blurred the edges of event and representation in the ballad. Maura Murphy, writing about “the ballad-singing problem,” claims that “the popular ballad was both cause and effect of much political and social unrest among the populace, and whether contemporaries approved or disapproved of its influence, all were agreed on its power.”²³

Thus Irish rebel songs, labor songs, and lynching ballads are all tactical rather than merely representational. To say that “The Man Frank Weems” is a song about the labor movement does not adequately describe its function; it is a part of the labor movement in much the same way that a strike or a government policy or a contract is. Whereas Irish rebel songs and labor songs are revolutionary, seeking to change the social order, most lynching ballads are reactionary, seeking to protect the existing social order from potential change.²⁴ Lynching ballads, therefore, are neither forms divorced from fact nor merely “records of fact” but tactical representations that merge to a great extent with the events they represent. They are statements in the discourse by which society is constructed.²⁵ Lynching ballads are about lynching, but, even more important, they are a part of the phenomenon of lynching.

Discourse, however, is but one side of the construction of society. Bruce Lincoln contends, in Discourse and the Construction of Society, that “no consideration of discourse is complete that does not also take account of force.” Although discourse is a useful tool for fusing the “complex amalgam of multiple subunits … that are only imperfectly bonded together to form the social unit,” its dual modes of “ideological persuasion” and “sentiment evocation” are not always sufficient. Sometimes direct force is required to establish or maintain the social order. “Together,” writes Lincoln, “discourse and force are the chief means whereby social borders, hierarchies, institutional formations, and habituated patterns of behavior are both maintained and modified.”²⁶

Lincoln's discussion of force and discourse is enlightening, but his separation of the two concepts overlooks an important aspect of their relationship: the discursive value of force. Just as statements, legislation, scripture, literature, and institutional practices figure into a discursive economy, acts of violence have an effect on discourse in addition to their direct effects on society. If we accept that discourse affects action, that is, that people often do what they talk about, as in the case of the Concord lynching that was preceded by racist statements in the editorials of local newspapers, it is not too much to suppose that the acts of violence become the occasion for further statements that affect the shape of the discourse. For example, the lynching of J. V. Johnson, an act of violence, produced a variety of contributions to this discourse in the form of a speech by Governor Robert Glenn, a letter to the newspaper denouncing Johnson's character, and the presiding judge's actions. In this sense, the lynching itself, the act of communal murder, is neither the beginning nor the end of the event of the lynching. The lynching proper and the ballad about it join the newspaper editorials, legends, rumors, court records, and so forth to constitute what we might term a “discursive event” in which each of the above forms acts as a statement within a larger discourse that continually constructs and reconstructs social relationships and structures. Thus to understand lynchings, we must understand how they contribute to such a discourse and how meaning is crafted in the variety of statements produced by the discursive event of a lynching.²⁷

When the discursive value of an individual's actions threatened the existing social order, a lynching might result. The case of Alec Whitley is one example. As a young man, he had been involved in a variety of crimes, from larceny to barn burning and possibly murder. None of these crimes upset the social order to any great extent. They could be absorbed or contained within normal procedures. Whitley was brought to trial, found innocent or guilty, and life went on as usual. When he murdered Burt Tucker in such a gruesome manner, however, Whitley flagrantly transgressed his community's sense of how people ought to relate to one another (for example, that we ought not dismember one another). As Bruce Lincoln notes, “When an individual has been branded as a dangerous deviant for one reason or another, society excludes him or her from its midst.” The line for blacks was even finer. “Talking back to a white man,” writes Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “seeking employment ‘out of place,’ refusing to obey an order—the transgression of a whole range of nebulous taboos could lead to a verbal rebuke, a beating, or a lynching.”²⁸

When the social order had been disturbed, the response of the community was to reestablish it by silencing the action or statement that had caused the disturbance. Jean-François Lyotard defines this as “terror,” “the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him.” Merely silencing the voice of the transgressor, however, fails to reestablish the social order because the statement or action is already a part of the discursive event, and subsequent statements may overlay but not entirely efface the original one. The metaphor of the text becomes useful at this point. We may view the corporeal body of the “criminal” as a text, an embodiment of the discursive value of his actions. J. V. Johnson was, in addition to other things, the site of origin for a powerful challenge to the established social order of Morven. His body had effected the death of a wealthy landowner's son, and the challenge of that action to the social order was as salient a feature of his person as the color of his hair.²⁹

Since the transgressor was himself a text of resistance, he had to be remade as a text of submission and compliance. The traces of the previous text, however, could not be totally effaced. Joe Kizer, even after his lynching made him into a text displaying the power relationships that existed in the community, was still in part the alleged rapist and murderer of Emma Hartsell, still a challenge to that social order. Like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands that could not be washed away, Joe Kizer's embodiment of a disruption in the social order remained. It is this problem of the body of the transgressor as palimpsest that accounts for the extraordinary levels of violence used in lynching. To view the violence of lynching simply as an indication of the depravity and barbarism of the lynchers is to beg the question. Why do lynchers commit such horrible acts of violence? Because they are savage and barbaric. How do we know they are savage and barbaric? Because they commit these horrible acts of violence. Rather, the extravagant levels of violence were a stylistic technique used to foreground the text created by the lynching and overwhelm the previous text of transgression.

The stylistics of some lynchings are very similar to the stylistics of public execution in classical France as analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. Like those public executions, lynching “belongs … to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.” “The public execution,” Foucault suggests, “belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored.” The ritual elements of a lynching are, in this paradigm, less a static reflection of belief than a repertoire of techniques for the creation of meaning in a particular text, like the literary devices of imagery or meter. The lynching becomes the vehicle for the conveyance of meaning, not the expression of some sense of justice, however twisted. “Its aim,” like that of public execution, “is not so much to reestablish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.” It is this surfeit of power which is inscribed as the new message in the text of the body of the lynched man.³⁰

The very act of the lynching is the principal text, but powerful though the text of the lynching itself is, there are certain limitations inherent in it. For one thing, the audience for the text is limited to those actually present at the lynching, whether participating, resisting, or observing. Also, the event itself is ephemeral. If the text is to continue to disseminate its message, it must be made more enduring. The body of the lynched man serves as the site of several different kinds of attempts to sustain the text of the lynching. The most obvious of these is the viewing of the corpse by the public. Mutilation of the corpse, in the form of wounds, missing fingers or genitalia, bullet holes, and other signs of the mob's work, becomes part of the text which is to be viewed the next day by the public. Another way in which a particular message was inscribed on the corpse was by placing a sign or placard on it. Even though the general outlines of the message inscribed in the text of the lynched man must already be fairly clear, the mob verbalizes its message and leaves a text upon a text. The taking of souvenirs was another way of preserving the text of a lynching. A button, an ear, a finger, or some other personal effect constitutes a locus of memory and a site for the future recounting of the story of the lynching. Finally, photographs were yet another means of preserving the spectacle of the lynching.

It is in ballads and oral accounts, however, that the messages of the lynching are perhaps best preserved. In all of the lynching ballads in North Carolina, both the transgression and its punishment are described, thus continuing the message of the lynching: transgression and reinscription. Long after the corpse is cut down, after the newspapers that recount the event are thrown away, a ballad, if it survives, will tell the story of the lynching. “J. V. Johnson” was in oral tradition as late as 60 years after the event it describes. “Alec Whitley” is known at least 102 years after the lynching. Every time the ballad is sung, the meaning of the lynching is repeated and its effect on the social order reasserted. An inert text of a lynching, such as a photograph or printed account, may be passed over lightly, but an aural text, such as a legendary account or a ballad, grasps the listener with the immediacy of the spoken word, demanding the active participation of both the listener and the speaker in the communicative process.

Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, explains this capacity of narration to unify separate performances. Although “the narratives' reference may seem to belong to the past,” writes Lyotard, “in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation.” He continues, “It is the present act that on each of its occurrences marshals in the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the ‘I have heard’ and the ‘you will hear.’ The important thing about the pragmatic protocol of this kind of narration is that it betokens a theoretical identity between each of the narrative's occurrences.” A similar phenomenon, I would argue, happens with ballads, particularly ballads recounting local history. Each singing of “Alec Whitley,” for instance, becomes a link in a chain of performances by particular singers stretching back to the first performance of the ballad, each performance not only recounting the event but also reasserting the social values of the ballad.³¹

We can perhaps learn as much from the decline and slow disappearance of lynching ballads as we can from close study of the ballads themselves. Since the lynching ballad was in important ways part of the larger cultural text of the lynching—as befits a tactical representation rather than a static representation—we might expect the fate of these ballads to be more closely connected to the circumstances from which they arose than is the case with other ballads. A ballad like “The Wreck of the Old 97,” about a train wreck in Danville, Virginia, in 1903, is not an integral part of the event it represents in the same way a lynching ballad is part of the lynching. Thus “The Wreck of the Old 97” remains popular even though railroads are no longer such a prominent part of American life as they were in 1903. “J. V. Johnson,” in contrast, fades away not only because lynching is no longer a major facet of life in the South but also, and more important, because the ballad's tactical function no longer operates in contemporary social circumstances.³²

Lynching ballads, consequently, are disappearing from oral tradition. With two exceptions, all the lynchings with associated ballads occurred before 1920. Of the lynching ballads discussed in this essay, only “Alec Whitley” and “Lines Written on the Assassination of D. B. Tucker” remain in oral tradition and then only as one-verse fragments. To some extent, we must consider this as part of the overall decline in the past several decades of ballad-singing as a widespread form of folk culture.

Yet even if ballads in general have been in decline, lynching ballads are declining more quickly than others because social change has disrupted the symbiotic relationship between them and the communities in which they were sung. At one time, the memory of the lynching in Concord was still fresh enough in the minds of many local residents for “The Death of Emma Hartsell” to be pertinent. The ballad provided an artfully rendered synopsis of the event and made comments on social facts that were still highly relevant. Lynchings were still a real possibility, as demonstrated by the 1906 lynching of three men in nearby Salisbury. Later, as those who could recall the Concord lynching firsthand began to pass and as lynching was succeeded by other techniques of social control of unruly behavior, “The Death of Emma Hartsell” lost its point of reference.

And yet two final examples show the surprising endurance of two North Carolina lynching ballads and suggest the tenacity of the genre. The murder of Gladys Kincaid in Morganton in 1927 led to the death of Broadus Miller, a black construction worker, at the hands of a posse. Miller's body was dragged through the streets of Morganton and put on view at the courthouse, making this an event with many of the trademarks of a lynching. Of the four texts about Gladys Kincaid's death, one, a ballad by Morganton singer and fiddler Tim Poteat called “The Fate of Gladys Kincaid,” was recorded for RCA, although the record was never released. Some thirty years later, however, Poteat's son, Britt Poteat, sang the ballad in Louisiana juke joints where it became popular for a time. Likewise, “The Death of Emma Hartsell” was recorded on a 45rpm record in the 1960s by pioneer hillbilly fiddler J. E. Mainer, who lived in Concord. This record and “a picture of the hanging of Tom and Joe” was included as a bonus to anyone who purchased one of Mainer's LP albums. The text of the ballad along with the photograph was eventually included in Mainer's 1966 songbook. The continuing popularity of these ballads against the backdrop of the civil rights movement poses intriguing questions. Were the listeners drawn to the ballads for their depiction of an earlier time with stricter racial barriers? Or had the social meanings of the ballads become so distant from the folk culture that once informed them that audiences heard only tragic ballads, not tales of violent retribution? These are questions historians and folklorists can answer by studying lynching ballads.³³

Notes

1. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynchings and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984).

2. Any overview of ballad scholarship in this country should start with D. K. Wilgus's indispensable volume, American Ballad Scholarship since 1898 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959). A few key works are Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882-98); Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil Sharp, English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917); Bertrand Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Tristram Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in America (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1950); G. Malcolm Laws, American Balladry from British Broadsides: A Guide for Students and Collectors (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1957) and Native American Balladry (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1964); and Roger D. Abrahams and George Foss, Anglo-American Folksong Style (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968). A specific ballad genre is discussed by Anne Cohen, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl!: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). The two articles in North Carolina Folklore are Heath Thomas, “Alec Whitley: The Man and the Ballad,” North Carolina Folklore 8 (December 1960): 16-21; and Jan A. Herlocker, “The Tragic Ballad of Miss Emma Hartsell,” North Carolina Folklore Journal 23 (August 1975): 82-88. Lomax gives the text of “The Strayhorn Mob,” composed by Sid Hemphill of Panola County, Mississippi, and some of its story in The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 323.

3. Since traditions of narrative ballads were stronger among whites than African Americans, it is not surprising that all the lynching ballads in this essay, indeed, the majority of lynching ballads I have found, come from white communities and present their perspective. For folk cultural expression of lynchings from an African-American perspective, we must look to forms other than the ballad. Legendary accounts of lynchings are too numerous to cite here, but one good example would be Heath Thomas's article. For a note on a fiddle tune commemorating a lynching, see my “Lynching Ballads in North Carolina” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1995). A haunt tale, or ghost story, about a lynching is exemplified by the story of the lynching of Willie Earle in Greenville, South Carolina, recounted in Nancy Roberts, South Carolina Ghosts: From the Coast to the Mountains (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983), 81-92. Places where lynchings occur tend to become traditional, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes in Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 41. They are also named, as in the case of J. V. Johnson to be discussed below and the lynching of Jim Rhodes in Charlottesville, Virginia, mentioned in a 1963 term paper by Ormonde Deane in the A. P. Hudson Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Library of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Customary behavior covers a wide range and is discussed in Brundage, Lynching in the New South, chap. 1, and my “Lynching Ballads in North Carolina,” chap. 1. African American folk culture of lynching is expressed, I believe, in legends such as those collected by folklorist Martha Nelson in North Carolina, possibly blues songs such as one by Sam Price mentioned in Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), 34, and oral poetry such as “A Black Man Talks to God,” composed by National Heritage Award winner Horace “Spoons” Williams in the 1930s.

4. Sid Hemphill's ballad “The Strayhorn Mob,” commissioned by the leader of the Mississippi mob, is an exception to this rule; it names the mob leaders. “In a Little Country Schoolyard” is found in Martha L. Cooper, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Nodaway County, Missouri, a Black History, 1840-1940 (Maryville, Mo.: N.p., 1986). Information on “Emmet Till” is in the song file of the Southern Folklife Collection. “The Ashland Tragedy” was collected by John Harrington Cox in his Folk-Songs of the South (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1963).

5. I compiled this account of the murder and lynching from articles in the Concord Times, June 2, 1898, and the Concord Daily Standard, May 30, 1898.

6. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 150. The victim's appeal for water is mentioned by E. J. Linker in Randolph S. Hancock, “Sweet Emma Met an Awful Fate,” a newspaper article from 1955, and in Ned Cline, “Even Negroes Took Part in Cabarrus's Last Lynching,” Salisbury Post, November 29, 1964, in which “Kiser begged for a final drink of whiskey.”

7. Cohen, Poor Pearl, Poor Girl!, 40.

8. Cooper, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, 285.

9. For more details on the historical context of “The Death of Emma Hartsell” see chapter 2 of my “Lynching Ballads in North Carolina.” Just as a ballad has a historical context, a specific performance is conditioned by contextual factors. The manifesto of the performance-based approach to folklore is Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1977).

10. The best account of Alec Whitley's life and death, drawing on court documents and newspaper accounts, is David D. Almond Jr.'s The Lynching of Alec Whitley (Albemarle, N.C.: David D. Almond Jr., 1978). This work also includes the ballad by Rev. E. P. Harrington discussed later in this essay as an appendix.

11. In 1927, some kinspeople exhumed his body from beneath the red oak tree and reinterred it in the cemetery of Smith Grove Baptist Church near Big Lick. The tombstone lists his date of death incorrectly as 1894, perhaps to confuse those who would recall his history. According to David Deese of the Stanly News and Press, whenever journalist Fred Morgan wrote about the subject for the News and Press in the early 1950s, he received angry and even threatening telephone calls. David Deese wrote a column on Whitley as late as 1990, and, a week later, added, “The response to last week's column about the 1892 lynching of Alec Whitley in Albemarle has been encouraging. My home phone began ringing within hours after the newspaper hit the streets. Everyone had a bit of lore to offer me.” Deese did not receive any threats in response to this article. While inquiring about this subject in Stanly County in 1994, I was warned twice by individuals who made sure that I knew that some people still held strong feelings about the subject.

12. Abrahams and Foss, Anglo-American Folksong Style, 67; H. M. Belden and A. P. Hudson, eds., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Vol. 2 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952). A very good recent study of “Young Edwin in the Lowlands Low” and the ballad tradition of a particular North Carolina community is Adrienne Hollifield's “Family, Tradition, Orality, and Cultural Intervention in Sodom Laurel Ballad Singing,” North Carolina Folklore Journal 42 (Winter-Spring 1995): 1-34.

13. Two informants told me that Whitley first cut off Tucker's feet and then forced him to walk.

14. The connection between dismemberment and lynching in folk culture may be stronger than I indicate here. An anonymous informant, talking about the murder of Emma Hartsell, told me that her killers “chopped her up and put the pieces in a dishpan behind the stove.” This detail is clearly an exaggeration based on her slashed throat, but it was related as justification for the lynching of Kizer and Johnson.

15. Its size and shape indicate that Harrington's ballad was printed as a broadside. According to Laws in American Balladry from British Broadsides, 40, “Many late 18th and early 19th century ballads are to be found on narrow sheets or slips about one-fourth the size of a folio sheet.” Typographical clues also support the supposition that it was a broadside. George F. Hahn of Mt. Pleasant, Cabarrus County, found a copy of the broadside in the bottom of a trunk that had belonged to his great-grandmother, Tabitha Hunneycutt Roland, who lived in Big Lick, the Stanly County community where Whitley was from, in 1892. According to Hahn, the broadside was widely distributed around the time of the lynching.

16. For the role of the supernatural in native American balladry, see Laws, Native American Balladry, 35. Thomas's article on Whitley was a reprint of a newspaper story Thomas first researched and wrote in 1949. For a full discussion of the history of this article, which contains the only full text of the ballad, see my “Lynching Ballads in North Carolina,” 68-70.

17. My account of the murder, trial, and lynching is condensed from several articles in the Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer dated December 28, 1905, April 26, 1906, and May 30, 1906. There were also articles about the lynching in the Charlotte Daily Observer on May 29, 1906, and the Raleigh News and Observer on May 29, 1906. Dates of the arraignment and trial are given in the Minutes of North Carolina Superior Court, Vol. H, Anson County, North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh. See also Paul D. Escott, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 5.

18. Record of Lunacy, Office of the Clerk of Court, Wadesboro, Anson County, N.C.

19. “The Anson County Lynching,” Biblical Recorder [Raleigh, N.C.] 71 (June 6, 1906): 8; R. L. Gray, “Winning the War on Lynching,” World's Work, September 1925, 508-11. This ballad has been collected only once. Novella Caudle Carpenter of Peachland, Union County, sang it for Douglas Helms, then a student in Daniel W. Patterson's class, on December 30, 1966. Patterson transcribed the words and tune, and I corrected them.

20. The melody of “J. V. Johnson” also bears an affinity to “The Drunkard's Hell,” in The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, ed. Jan P. Schinhan, Vol. 5 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1962), 23.

21. Laws, Native American Balladry, 2, 27, 55.

22. In addition to employing the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (1989), for “tactical”—“of or relating to arrangement, esp. the arrangement of procedure with a view to ends”—I wish to use the term “tactical” in the technical sense employed by philosopher Todd May in his notion of tactical political philosophy discussed in The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 11. He writes: “For tactical political philosophy, there is no center within which power is to be located. Otherwise put, power, and consequently politics, are irreducible. There are many different sites from which it arises, and there is an interplay among these various sites in the creation of the social world.”

23. John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 220-21; Maura Murphy, “The Ballad Singer and the Role of the Seditious Ballad in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Dublin Castle's View,” Ulster Folklife 25 (1979): 84.

24. In a few exceptions such as “J. V. Johnson” and “In a Quiet Country Churchyard,” the lynching is condemned.

25. A better term may be “phrase,” as Jean-François Lyotard uses it in The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

26. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 3, 89.

27. A particularly inflammatory editorial about a local African American politician appeared in the Concord Daily Standard on May 4, 1898, three weeks before the lynching there. The letter about J. V. Johnson, signed by most of Morven's prominent citizens, is found in the Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, July 5, 1906.

28. Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 99; Hall, Revolt against Chivalry, 141.

29. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 63.

30. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977), 47-48.

31. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 22.

32. Norm Cohen, “Robert W. Gordon and the Second Wreck of ‘Old 97,’” Journal of American Folklore 87 (1974): 12-38.

33. For a fuller account of Gladys Kincaid's murder and the ballads it inspired, see the second chapter of my “Lynching Ballads in North Carolina.” I am indebted to Wayne Martin of the Folklife Office of the North Carolina Arts Council for the information on J. E. Mainer's recording and publication of “The Death of Emma Hartsell.”