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Outlaws |
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8 "Brady, Brady, why didn't you run,
When you saw that Duncan had a forty-four gun? Oh, Brady, Brady, Brady, you oughter have run; You hadn't oughter faced that Gatling gun!"
9 His wife came in in a mighty flirt, Wiped up the blood with her underskirt. "Hush, my children, and don't you cry,
We'll all draw a pension when your daddy die."
10 The womens all heard that poor Brady was dead, They goes back home and they dresses in red, Come a-slippin' an' slidin' up and down the street In their big Mother Hubbards and their stockin' feet. |
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BATSON
c. No. 95. Ace. on guitar and sung by Stavin' Chain, Lafayette, La., 1934.. Fiddle and guitar accompaniment.
Stavin' Chain said that this long, shuffling, and bloody story—whose tune and stanza form are evidently derived from "Frankie and Johnny"— concerns a Lake Charles, Louisiana, murder. Batson, he told us, was a white day laborer, accused of murdering his employer, Mr. Earle, along with his whole family. They were found in an open field with only a little red soil thrown over their bodies. Inquiry fails to confirm Stavin' Chain's story3 but no one who has ever heard him sing this wailing song with his guitar, at times beating a solemn dirge and then shrieking in hopeless despair can ever forget it. You've seen and felt a hanging. You notice, too, that the sympathies of the ballad singer rest wholly with the accused, not with his victims. |
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