GerryM wrote: Robert, is "Mary Phagan" the piece of antisemitic trash that's in the DT as Mary Fagan?

Anti-Semitic, populist trash. The man most responsible for rousing the population against Leo Frank was Thomas Watson, who was basically a hundred-year-earlier version of Donald Trump. Mary Phagan was robbed, murdered, and almost certainly raped by the janitor Jim Conley, but the Jewish manager Leo Frank was arrested, convicted, and eventually lynched for the murder. And Watson was cheering the whole time.

To be fair, Frank was the willing manager of a sweatshop, but he was a northern Jew, so to Georgians he was The Enemy twice over. He was a jerk; he was not a murderer.

The song didn't deserve fame, but it got it -- Vernon Dalhart recorded it, among others. Fiddlin' John Carson had a part in it, too -- very likely he wrote it. And so the tune was borrowed, both for "The Mill Mother's Lament" (which is so heart-wrenching that it almost makes up for its source) and "The Death of Roy Rickey" (which is not worth looking up).