Prophet Singer by Mark Allan Jackson

Author:Mark Allan Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A stylized image of numerous lynching victims hanging from a bridge with a wasted city set in the distance, c. 1946. Sketch by Woody Guthrie. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Archives.

The connection between the Nelsons’ end and his lyrics becomes much more certain in the song “Slipknot.” Here, the narrator twice asks, “Did you ever lose a brother in that slipknot?” Then comes the answer, “Yes. My brother was a slave … he tried to escape, / And they drug him to his grave with a slipknot.” This question and answer pattern is repeated in the second verse:

Did you ever lose your father on that slipknot?

Did you ever lose your father on that slipknot?

Yes, they hung him from a pole an’ they shot him full of holes

And they left him hang to rot in that slipknot.99

As noted by Oklahoma folklorist Guy Logsdon, “The power of this song indicates how far [Guthrie] had come in his idea about race relations and how deeply he felt about the evil of lynching.”100 But by only looking at the lyrics, you would find no specific trace of the Nelsons’ murder. However, an endnote to this song does directly reference this incident when Guthrie writes, “Dedicated to the many negro mothers, fathers, and sons alike, that was lynched and hanged under the bridge of the Canadian River, seven miles south of Okemah, Okla., and to the day when such will be no more.”101 Obviously, he sees his antilynching work as a way to rectify the wrong that occurred in his hometown.

Other moments from Guthrie’s writing directly reference the Nelsons’ deaths. Among its other invocations of Guthrie’s youth, the autobiographical song “High Balladree” offers this striking remembrance:

A nickle post card I buy off your rack

To show you what happens if you’re black and fight back

A lady and two boys hanging down by their necks

From the rusty iron rigs of my Canadian bridge.102

Here, the postcard referenced earlier appears in full, just as he remembered it. But of all Guthrie’s antilynching songs, “Don’t Kill My Baby and My Son” (also titled “Old Dark Town” and “Old Rock Jail”) most fully re-creates the Nelsons’ end.

In this song, the narrator returns to “the old dark town … where I was born” and almost immediately hears “the lonesomest sounding cry / That I ever had heard.” Investigating, he discovers “a black girl pulling her hair” in jail and hears her lament, which becomes the song’s chorus:

Don’t let them kill my baby,

And don’t let them kill my son!

You can hang me by my neck

On that Canadian River’s bridge!

Don’t let them kill my baby and my son!

In another verse, we find that she sits in jail and faces death because “A bad man had pulled his gun / To make her hide him away.” Soon after these revelations, the narrator walks into a store and finds a disturbing scene on a postcard: “I saw my Canadian River’s bridge, / Three bodies swung in the wind.” As he stares at the card, he hears her mercy plea once again.

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