Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Rev. Gary Davis (extreme left) and Bob Dylan (extreme right) at Gil Turner’s wedding, 1962. (photo credit 7.3)

  There were also other important, if less celebrated, songwriters who were actually based in St. Louis. One, a bar owner and deputy constable named Tom Turpin, wrote, copyrighted, and published in the 1890s some of the first ragtime songs, including “Bowery Buck” and “St. Louis Rag.” Like Handy, Turpin expected his compositions would end up being performed in the parlors of respectable middle-class homes. Another St. Louis songwriter, Bill Dooley, was very different, an untrained musician who sang and played on the city’s street corners. As near as can be determined, Dooley composed what came to be known as “Frankie and Albert” (originally titled “Frankie Killed Allen,” because of a newspaper reporter’s mix-up) even as Britt lay dying in City Hospital. It is likely, given the proximity of the events and the musical similarities, that Dooley also wrote “Stagolee.” Handy deserves a great deal of credit, but the blues had more than one parent, and long before “St. Louis Blues” appeared, blues music was traveling down countless musical paths all across the South and, in time, the nation.

  The identities of the bards who wrote “Delia” and “White House Blues,” as well as when, precisely, they wrote them, remain unknown—although both songs sound as if they could be rearrangements of “Stagolee” and “Frankie and Albert.” (One field recording of “Cooney and Delia” from 1935, by the Florida duo Booker T. Sapps and Roger Matthews, actually bears the title “Frankie and Albert.”) All four songs tell stories of shootings and trials, involving a range of victims that included a young black girl, two pimps, and a president of the United States. “Delia,” like “Frankie and Albert,” concerns a murder that grew from an impassioned lovers’ quarrel. Which song influenced the others and when, and how those influences have continued to unfold, will never be fully untangled. But no matter how the songs came to be the way they did, when Dylan reached back to record “Delia,” along with “Frankie and Albert” and “Stagolee,” he did more than revive some traditional material. To reclaim his own art, he recovered the songs that did the most to give birth to the blues.

  Son of a bitch.

  The curse is ubiquitous and supple, mild enough today for prime time. It can connote a bad turn of luck. It gets said in commiseration or as a shout of glee. In the white South, slurred—“sum-bitch”—it passes as a mild obscenity, more emphatic and vulgar than “jerk,” yet less offensive than the usual four-letter words. But in the poor, rough, and black Yamacraw district in the west end of Savannah on Christmas Eve night in 1900, it was a curse so “wicked”—according to one version of “Delia”—that when fourteen-year-old Delia Green called her fourteen- (maybe fifteen-) year-old lover, Moses “Cooney” Houston, a son of a bitch, he shot her dead.

  That version of the song does not reveal why Delia cursed Cooney, what the curse was, why Cooney’s outrage turned lethal, and why anyone should care enough to write a song about it. Most of the other versions are equally elliptical, including the one that Dylan sings on World Gone Wrong. In his liner notes to the album, though, Dylan offers an interpretation of the song that fairly accurately evokes the actual event: “The song has no middle range, comes whipping around the corner, seems to be about counterfeit loyalty.”

  The Yamacraw district, Savannah, Georgia, circa 1909. This photograph, from the Christian reformer and scholar H. Paul Douglass’s book Christian Reconstruction in the South (1909), was obviously shot to show the neighborhood in its best light. (photo credit 7.4)

  Dylan’s understanding, even with its tentative note, comes closer by far to what happened than the most widely listened to “Delia” to date, by the late Johnny Cash. “Delia’s Gone”—a common alternate title for the song—is the overpowering first track on Cash’s superb album American Recordings, which, when released in 1994, a year after World Gone Wrong, won Cash a new following among music fans of the rap-and-grunge generation. Cash sings in the first person as an unnamed, scheming killer dealt some unmentioned hurt that is almost certainly infidelity, who has tracked the “low-down, triflin’ ” Delia to Memphis, tied her to a chair, and blasted her to a pulp with a submachine gun. The killer’s conscience bothers him after he lands in prison, but the song ends remorselessly, with a passive-voice line that shifts the blame back from the murderer to his victim.

  It’s all very different from what Dylan sings and writes—and from the version of “Delia” that Cash recorded in 1962. Although also sung in the first person, Cash’s earlier rendition leaves the killer’s motive unclear and ends with him shackled to a ball and chain, dogged by guilt and Delia’s ghost. Here, the killer cannot escape his shame, even for one defiant moment. According to Cash, he found the new “Delia’s Gone” in the same part of his imagination where he found “Folsom Prison Blues”—a revision by an artist “older and wiser to human depravity” than he once was.13 Whether out of wisdom or vicarious, playacting evil, a young 1990s public, on the verge of the gangsta boom, loved it. Or perhaps the young public loved another, even more fanciful version of the song, as presented in the video that accompanied Cash’s song and that got heavy airplay on MTV and CMT. There, the heroin-chic Calvin Klein model Kate Moss played Delia, the perfect white woman-child victim for a certain kind of modern American ballad psychosis.

  Delia Green was also a woman-child, but even if we know almost nothing about what she looked like, it’s obvious that she was no Kate Moss. And Cooney Houston, the truly disturbing character in the original story, was not exactly the character that Johnny Cash inhabited—although at the time, some people thought that Houston was deeply if deceptively cool, calculating, and ruthless.

  Thanks to the research of John Garst, we know more about the facts behind “Delia” than we do for most American blues ballads. At around 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Day, Delia Green, “a colored girl,” one newspaper reported, died of a gunshot wound to the groin at her home at 113 Ann Street in Savannah, where she resided with her mother. The police arrested a light-skinned Negro, Moses Houston (most commonly called Cooney, but also referred to as Mose), and booked him for murder. There was never any question about who pulled the trigger, only about why.

  The shooting occurred at the home of Willie West and his wife, Emma, one block from where Delia lived. There is conflicting testimony about what happened at the Wests’. Some witnesses said that the place was filled with drunken carousers, most of them women. Others said the group was small, everyone was sober (or that everyone was sober except Cooney Houston), and the assembled were standing around the Wests’ organ singing “Rock of Ages.” As it was Christmas Eve, an occasion for special celebration and feasting for southern blacks since slavery times, perhaps there was some truth to both accounts—in which case the singing of “Rock of Ages” may have been more profane than pious. In any event, Cooney Houston appears to have been what one witness at the trial called “full,” which today would be “loaded,” as in drunk.

  After the shot rang out, Willie West chased Houston, caught him, and handed him over to the patrolman J. T. Williams. Officer Williams later testified that Cooney immediately confessed to shooting his girlfriend, saying that they had argued and that she had called him a son of a bitch and so he shot her, and he would gladly do it again. For Cooney, it seemed, getting cursed at by a woman was an exculpating circumstance.

  Houston stood trial, charged as an adult with murder. (There was no juvenile justice system at the time in Georgia.) On the stand, Houston, backed up by a witness named Willie Mills, told a different story from the one reported by Officer Williams. In the midst of a drunken party, supposedly, Willie West bade Cooney to retrieve his pistol from a repair shop, which Cooney did. Cooney then placed the gun under a napkin. After Cooney returned from a second errand to get more beer and whiskey, he and a friend named Eddie Cohen got in a friendly tussle over the gun, which went off. The bullet accidentally hit Delia.

  Houston’s courtroom story convinced nobody. Another witnes
s testified that Willie Mills, Houston’s corroborating witness, was not even on the scene at the time of the shooting. Eddie Cohen, identified as Emma West’s second cousin, swore that he had already left the house when the killing occurred and that he had not struggled with “this boy” over a pistol. The jury found Houston guilty but recommended mercy. The judge, Paul F. Seabrook, sentenced him to life in prison instead of death.

  So much for the basic facts. Some surrounding events, and the coverage in the newspapers, made that story much more interesting—and help account for both the power and the eeriness of “Delia.”

  Reports of Delia Green’s murder made it into the two leading local newspapers, the Savannah Morning News and the Savannah Evening Press. Even though the victim as well as the perpetrator was black, the news was big enough for white editors and reporters to cover the event. The reports affirmed to white readers that drunkenness and violence were endemic to the Yamacraw district. But what made the story more than just another black-on-black murder was the ages of those involved. The first dispatch, in the Morning News, noted that Delia was a mere girl “but 14 years old,” yet said nothing about Cooney’s age. The Evening Press, published hours later, got the full story. “Boy Killed Girl,” it reported on page 5. It was not simply a crime of passion arising from a lovers’ spat; it was a crime of passion involving two lovers barely out of puberty. It was a childish murder. It was precisely the opposite of Johnny Cash’s deliberate mayhem, carefully plotted and cruelly executed by an evil man.

  The trial transcript affirmed the impulsiveness of the attack. Here, according to the transcript, is roughly what transpired between Delia and Cooney:

  Cooney: My little wife is mad with me tonight. She does not hear me. She is not saying anything to me. (To Delia): You don’t know how I love you.

  Mutual cursing followed.

  Delia: You son of a bitch. You have been going with me for four months. You know I am a lady.

  Cooney: That is a damn lie. You know I have had you as many times as I have fingers and toes. You have been calling me “husband.”

  Delia: You lie!

  About fifteen minutes after the argument ended, Cooney started for the door, turned, pulled out a pistol, and fired at Delia. He had boasted of a grown-up fantasy about informal wedlock. (It sounds as if the sex was real, although boys in their early teens are known to lie extravagantly about far more equivocal sexual encounters. But the “husband” and “wife” part was not real, or so Delia insisted.) Delia broke up whatever was between them and verbally cut him dead. She was not his “little wife,” at least not anymore. She was a lady. He was low, a son of a bitch. Cooney turned hot, saying in so many words that he had fucked her twenty times, and that this meant she was no lady and, what’s more, that she was his. But Delia’s curse still burned in Cooney’s brain, and when he tried to one-up her, Delia hit right back, treating him (as one account put it) with “supreme contempt.” Minutes later, she was bleeding to death and Cooney was out the door.

  It is a commonplace that in passionate conflicts, women are agile with words, whereas men get frustrated and violent. Something like that seems to have happened here. Add the strong possibility that Willie and Emma West’s place, later described by Houston’s lawyer as a “rough house,” was actually a brothel, and that Delia Green may have been one of the Wests’ prostitutes, and the scene looks familiar enough. Yet Delia’s words painted a different picture: she was neither a common whore nor Cooney’s fictive spouse, she said, she was proper. Saying so with a curse got her killed by her disgruntled boyfriend, who may have been jealous of her johns.

  Whatever the case, these two were children. Even by the hard standards of the Jim Crow South of 1900, most people saw Delia Green and Cooney Houston that way, which is why the newspapers took immediate note of the murder as sensational. Albert Britt and Frankie Baker had a similar tussle, but it came after a series of events and by mature if maddened design. (Although Britt was barely older than Cooney, Baker appears to have been in her twenties.) With the adolescents Delia and Cooney, the words cut deeper and the killing came quicker.

  “Boy Charged with Murder,” blared the front-page headline of the Savannah Evening Press on the eve of Houston’s trial, three months after the shooting. At the trial itself, age made all the difference, and so did, more subtly, race.

  The defense made a great deal of Houston’s youth. Cooney, having by now certainly turned fifteen, showed up for his arraignment dressed in short pants. The Morning News reported that he had “the round cheerful countenance of many mulattoes” and that he “seemed to be rather above the average of negro intelligence.” He “gave no outward indication of being possessed by the ‘abandoned and malignant heart,’ which the law says shall be inferred to exist” in cases of murder.

  In a later petition of clemency, Houston’s white attorney, Raiford Falligant, an eminent young member of the Georgia bar, laid out the case for the defense. Houston, Falligant said, was “a mere child” at the time of the killing. He had “got into bad company and so unfortunately committed the act that he now suffers for.” It was all a tragic accident. Cooney “was crazed by drink in boisterous company for the first time in his life and … the crowd he was with and in got him drunk.”

  The truly disturbing part of the proceedings, though, at least to the reporters, came immediately after the jury delivered its verdict of guilty. Houston’s mother, described by the Morning News as “an old black woman of respectable appearance,” broke down and sobbed, which was natural enough. Cooney stood up, emotionless, at Judge Seabrook’s command.

  Seabrook noted the jury’s recommendation for mercy, and he followed through with mercy, sentencing Houston to life imprisonment. “In doing so,” he concluded, “I exhort you to be a man, even in confinement, to repent of your past evil deeds and strive to earn the confidence and respect of those placed in authority above you.” But Cooney did not cooperate with the courtroom theater. Gaily, he thanked the judge and pranced out in a bailiff’s custody, “calm and as debonair,” the News dispatch said, “as if the experience through which he had just passed was a matter of every day occurrence and of no particular importance.”

  As the convict waited to be taken to prison, a sheriff’s deputy asked him how he liked the verdict and sentence. “I don’t like it at all,” he replied, “but I guess I’ll have to stand it.” The next day, the News reported that Houston’s age had “saved his neck” and that he had endured the ordeal “without turning a hair.”

  What actually happened may have been more pathetic. Cooney, scared out of his wits, could easily have been mustering some teenage bravado. Or maybe, dazed and confused, he simply tried, too late, to show a last bit of respect to the judge, as he’d been instructed to do by his lawyer. (“Thank you, sir,” is what Cooney said.) But that is not how it came across in the papers. Instead, it seemed as if a young black—literally a boy—made light of the grimmest of circumstances, sassed a white judge, and showed not regret but a twinkle of triumph. He was a killer, no matter what his age—and by cheating the gallows, he had beaten the system. He was not ashamed. He was not pitiable. And he’d fooled the judge and jury.

  Sometime between 1906 and 1908, the folklorist and sociologist Howard Odum first heard a song about the Delia-Cooney case, under the title “One More Rounder Gone,” while doing fieldwork in Newton County, Georgia—not far from where Barbecue Bob Hicks and his compatriots would start to gain notice ten years later.* In 1911, Odum published that version in the Journal of American Folk-Lore. But Odum’s findings were insufficient for Robert Winslow Gordon, the folklorist who was John Lomax’s predecessor at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Fascinated by the song, Gordon traced its origin to Savannah, where, he said, it was sung as early as 1901 to the same tune as a song he identified as “McKinley (White House Blues).” Given where the actual events transpired, Gordon was almost certainly correct about the place and date—although given that Cooney shot Delia ni
ne months before Czolgosz shot McKinley, it is not entirely certain whether the melody of “Delia” came from “White House Blues” or vice versa. (One version of “Delia,” collected in South Carolina in 1923 under the title “Delia Holmes,” contains the refrain “Buffalo, sweet Buffalo,” which suggests that “White House Blues” was, indeed, the model for “Delia,” and not the other way around.)

  Also, in 1927, the song collector Newman Ivey White published three variants of “Delia,” obtained between 1915 and 1924 in North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Zora Neale Hurston found another version in Florida, and three more appeared under the title “Delia Holmes” in an article by Chapman Milling published in the Southern Folklore Quarterly in 1937. By 1940, there were at least two commercially recorded variants: Reese Du Pree’s “One More Rounder Gone,” released on OKeh Records in 1924; and Jimmie Gordon’s “Delhia,” released on Decca Records in 1939. And in 1940, Blind Willie McTell played his version of “Delia” in his session with John and Ruby Lomax.

  By 1940, though, “Delia” had already begun to mutate. At some point before 1927, the song migrated to the Bahamas, where new versions appeared. The original refrain had been some approximation of the line “Well, it’s one mo’ rounder gone,” or “All I had is gone,” but the Bahamians substituted a new line—“Delia’s gone, one more round, Delia’s gone”—which seems to have been a reworking of “one more rounder gone,” possibly from Du Pree’s record. In 1935, Alan Lomax and the folklorist and New York University professor Mary Elizabeth Barnicle made a field recording of what they called “Delia Gone” in the Bahamas. Several more Bahamian variants turned up on local field recordings and commercial releases before 1952.