Subject: RE: History: Tom Dooley didn't kill Laura Foster?!?
From:
GUEST
Date: 19 Oct 21 - 04:23 PM
I can add only 1 or 2 probably not very relevant facts: (a) Before I retired, I worked at a place where there were a lot of people from Eastern Europe (mainly Polish); there was a (man) with the surname Dula (I can't remember his forename) who was from the Czech Republic working briefly there (I am not however claiming that Tom Dooley/Dula was from that country (I don't think even Czechoslovakia existed at the time Laura Foster was killed; it seems to have been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until the latter fell in 1918 after the 1st World War - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_Republic. (b) The first recorded version of "Tom Dooley" was in 1929 for Victor Records by a G.B. Grayson, a blind fiddler from Mountain City, Tennessee, who was a descendant of Sherriff Grayson, and a Henry Whitter, according to Clinton Heylin's book "It's One For the Money: The Song Snatchers who carved up a century of pop and sparked a musical revolution." (Constable, London, 2015). I can heartily recommend this book, which gives a lot of information on the origins of songs; in the case of Tom Dooley, it says that though it was collected in 1938 (i.e. 9 years after Grayson and Whitter's release) by the folklorist Frank Warner from a Frank Profitt. It says that Warner would however have known about three versions of the song in the Frank C. Brown collection (Warner studied under Brown and Newman Ivey White) which were collected by "the trusty Mrs. Sutton shortly after the Great War." Mrs. Sutton apparently stated "[It] was composed by an old negro named Charlie Davenport, and sung to the tune of "Run, Nigger, Run." The next paragraph in Heylin's book however states "What makes a negro author particularly enticing is the fact that the song is a lyrical redaction of a vulgar ballad, 'The murder of Laura Foster', written shortly after the dead (which was in 1866) by Thomas Land..." Frank Warner recorded the song for Elektra in 1952, the same year Frank C. Brown's multiple versions finally appeared in print. Apparently the song had been published by a Mellinger Henry the same year (1938) that Frank Warner recorded the song by Frank Proffitt on his "primitive portable tape recorder."
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sj
