Bruce-

Here's what I have on Callahan:

A fiddler named Callahan in Manchester, Clay County, Ky. had killed someone in a feud and was put in jail. His fiancee, Bessie Martin (Bessie Larkin), married him after he was in jail and lived in the jail with him. Sentenced to be hung, as a last request Callahan asked if someone would play a tune on his fiddle, he would give him the fiddle. When no one came to play his fiddle, Callahan broke the fiddle over his casket.

The legend that the tune was written by a condemned man just before he was executed by hanging is a centuries old tale primarily attached to the Scottish outlaw Macpherson (see "Macpherson's Farewell"), hanged in Banff in the year 1700. D. W. Wilgus, in his article "The Hanged Fiddler Legend in Anglo-American Tradition," extensively explores the "Callahan" legend, first collected in 1909 by Katherine Jackson French near Louden, Kentucky, from two boys who "played and sang 'Callahan's Confession.'" A report by E.C. Perrow in the Journal of American Folklore (25) in 1912 gave that "Some years ago an outlaw named Callahan was executed in Kentucky. Just before his execution he sat on his coffin and played and sang a ballad of his own composing, and, when he had finished, broke his musical instrument over his knee." This story, in almost exactly the same words, was related by elderly Bell County, Kentucky, fiddler Estill Bingham (1899-1990) to Bob Butler and Bruce Greene, also appearing in Suzy Jones Oregon Folklore (Bingham had moved to Oregon for a time before returning to Kentucky).

Great story-similar to John Hardy- even if it's not true!

-Richie