The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #116137 Message #2507679
Posted By: Richie
04-Dec-08 - 10:59 AM
Thread Name: Origins: The authors of the 'Carter Family songs'
Subject: Lyr Add: JOHN HARDY WAS A DESPERATE LITTLE MAN
Jimmie Brown, the Newsboy was refernced by Joy: Jimmie Brown (the paper boy) by William Shakespeare Hays in 1875.
Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family: The session began in Louisville, Kentucky on June 10, 1931 the whole group recorded their song-and-spoken-word skits "The Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers in Texas" and "Jimmie Rogers Visits The Carter Family." On June 12 the first skit was redone to its released form.
The first release by the two top Country recording artists for Victor was "Jimmie Rodgers Visits the Carter Family" backed by Rodgers "Moonlight and Skies." The single was a big success by post 1929 standards, selling 24, 000 copies. Curiously, the other songs from that session (except Jimmie's solo "Let Me Be Your Side Track") were released five years later, long after Rodgers was dead.
John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man: was recorded by teh Carter Family in 1928 in one of their early session for Victor. The Carter Family version doesn't repeat the last lyric line, instead there is and instrumental verse.
The Carters version was the fourth recording of the song, preceeded by Eva Davis and local star Ernest Stoneman in 1925.
The song was collected in 1916 by Cecil Sharp. There is an excellent article by John Harrington Cox in the JOAFL. Here are some details about the history:
John Hardy was a black man working in the tunnels of West Virginia. In fact, as Alan Lomax remarks, "the two songs ["John Henry" & "John Hardy"] have sometimes been combined by folk singers, and the two characters confused by ballad collectors...."). One payday, in a crap game at Shawnee Coal Company's camp in what is today Eckman, WV, John Hardy killed a fellow worker. Lomax provides the following additional info- His white captors protected him from a lynch mob that came to take him out of jail and hang him. When the lynch fever subsided, Hardy was tried during the July term of the McDowell County Criminal Court, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. While awaiting execution in jail, he is said to have composed this ballad, which he later sang on the scaffold. He also confessed his sins to a minister, became very religious, and advised all young men, as he stood beneath the gallows, to shun liquor, gambling and bad company. The order for his execution shows that he was hanged near the courthouse in McDowell County, January 19, 1894. His ballad appears to have been based upon certain formulae stanzas from the Anglo-Saxon ballad stock.... Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America, Garden City, 1960, p. 264; lyrics on pp. 271-273.
JOHN HARDY WAS A DESPERATE LITTLE MAN
John Hardy, he was a desp'rate little man,
He carried two guns ev'ry day.
He shot a man on the West Virginia line,
An' you ought seen John Hardy getting away.
John Hardy, he got to the Keystone Bridge,
He thought that he would be free.
And up stepped a man and took him by his arm,
Says, "Johnny, walk along with me."
He sent for his poppy and his mommy, too,
To come and go his bail.
But money won't go a murdering case;
They locked John Hardy back in jail.
John Hardy, he had a pretty little girl,
That dress that she wore was blue
As she came skipping through the old jail hall,
Saying, "Poppy, I've been true to you."
John Hardy, he had another little girl,
That dress that she wore was red.
She followed John Hardy to his hanging ground,
Saying, "Poppy, I would rather be dead."
I been to the East and I been to the West,
I been this wide world around.
I been to the river and I been baptized,
And now I'm on my hanging ground.
John Hardy walked out on his scaffold high,
With his loving little wife by his side.
And the last words she heard poor John-O say,
"I'll meet you in that sweet bye-and-bye."