This discussion of "Strange Fruit" made me think of another song about lynching. In this case the victims were a black woman and her two children, one of them just a baby. The song, both haunting and frightening, was written by Woody Guthrie and appears in the "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People" anthology he compiled along with Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger around 1940. The collection was not published until 1966, by which time Woody was too ill to even comment upon the song, let alone perform it.

What is most interesting is Woody's written introduction. He claims that when he was 8 or 9 he heard "a wild and blood curldling moan" of the woman who was being kept in the Okemah jail and who knew that she and her children would been murdered by a mob. Woody further writes that "my dad told me the whole story." I doubt that! Why? Because in "Woody Guthrie: a Life," Joe Klein argues that the lynching took place in 1910, two years before Woody was born, and that Charley Guthrie, Woody's dad, participated in the lynch mob. The woman's name, by the way, was Laura Nelson, and the whole incident is well documented with photographs later made into post cards!

Woody loved his dad and apparently had a very difficult time facing the possibility that he had been part of a lynch mob. This song is an indication of how Woody dealt with those emotions.

The chorus to the song:

Oh, don't kill my baby and my son,
Oh, don't kill my baby and my son, You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don't kill my baby and my son.

© Stormking Music 1966

--- Steve