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Outlaws
DUNCAN AND BRADY
ab. No. 1865. Tune from Camp No. i, Parchman, Miss., 1933. The air was also whistled "like a mocking bird" by a young negro convict. It seems to be a close relative of "Bad Man Ballad" in. American Ballads and Folksongs.
Nobody knows where Brady wore his "shinin' star" or in what alley saloon Duncan was bartender. You get the idea, however, that when Dun­can cooled Brady's fever down with a forty-four, nobody shed tears at his funeral. In fact, it seems to have been a field day for the ladies, when old King Brady, the bullying peace officer, got "biowed down":
When the women in loway heard the news> They wrote it down in old red shoes
Miss Scarborough has recorded versions in Texas; Odum and Johnson, fragments in Tennessee; Sandburg's and Gordon's versions mention East St. Louis specifically, and we have others from Texas. A person on a train sang it to me once the way she had heard it in a white caravan show in Kansas. The song comes, probably, from the Mississippi valley. I have made free to combine scattered stanzas so that they tell the story again the way the original may have told it.
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