Tom Dula

☞Hang Down Your Head!

☞Today in Music History -- 170 years ago, Sunday, June 22, 1845, noted American fiddle player & Confederate veteran Thomas Caleb Dula (1845-1868), better known as Tom Dooley, was born to a poor Appalachian hill-country family in Wilkes County, North Carolina.

☞In 1868, Tom Dooley, was hanged for the murder of his fiancée -- an event that has since come to be known as “The Murder That Sold 10,000 Guitars.”

Hang down your head Tom Dooley.

Hang down your head & cry.

Hang down your head Tom Dooley.

Poor boy, you’re bound to die

-- Excerpt from the “Ballad of Tom Dooley,” the most famous murder ballad in American Folk-Music history, which is credited with being the song that was most influential in launching the “Folk Music Revival” of the 1960s

☞Tom Dula was born on June 22, 1845 to a poor Appalachian hill-country family in Wilkes County, North Carolina. Three months prior to his 18th birthday, Tom Dula enlisted in the Confederate Army. He served as a private in Company K, 42nd North Carolina Infantry Regiment until the end of the War in 1865. On his Confederate muster card, Thomas Dula is listed as a “Musician” & “Drummer.”

☞Note: Various sources list Tom Dula’s year of birth as 1844, 1845, or 1846, but the year 1845 appears most often in the historical record.

☞From a young age, Tom Dula was known a ladies’ man. He & a neighbor girl, Ann Foster, were found in bed together by Ann’s mother when Ann was only fourteen years old. Sometime around the beginning of the War, Ann married James Melton. Shortly after arriving home from the War, Tom Dula resumed his relationship with Ann. Given his reputation as something of a libertine, it did not take Dula long to also begin an intimate relationship with Ann’s cousin Laura Foster. According to legend, Laura became pregnant shortly thereafter, & she & Dula decided to elope. On the morning that she was to meet Dula, she quietly left her home where she lived with her father & took off on his horse, Belle, never to be seen alive again. Sometime later, Laura’s decomposed body was found in a shallow grave with her legs drawn up in order for her to fit into the small hole. She had been stabbed through the heart.

☞Many of the stories about the murder implicate Ann Melton in some way. Some believe that Ann may have killed Laura because she was still in love with Tom & was jealous that Laura was marrying him. Others believe that Tom Dula knew or suspected that Ann had murdered Laura, but because he still loved Ann, he refused to implicate her after he was arrested & he took the blame for the murder. Ultimately, it was Ann’s word that led to the discovery of Laura’s body, leading to further speculation as to her guilt. Ann’s cousin, Pauline Foster, testified that Ann had led her to the site of the grave one night to check that it was still well-hidden.

☞Witnesses testified in court that Dula made the incriminating statement that he was going to “do in” whoever had given him the “pox” (syphilis). Testimony indicated that Dula believed that it was Laura who had given him syphilis, which he had passed on to Ann. The local doctor testified that he had treated both Tom & Ann for syphilis, as he did Pauline Foster, who actually seems to have been the first to be treated. Many believe that Dula may have caught the “pox” from Pauline Foster & passed it along to the other Foster women & falsely believed that he had caught it from Laura.

☞Dula’s role in Laura’s slaying is unclear. After he was declared a suspect, he fled the area before her body was discovered -- working for a time for Colonel James Grayson under the assumed name of Tom Hall, across the state line in Tennessee.

☞Even though much evidence suggested that Dula did not commit the murder, he was convicted & sentenced to hang. According to legend, Tom Dooley rode to the gallows in a wagon, sitting atop his own coffin, playing the banjo & singing the ballad that he had written about himself whilst in jail awaiting execution -- an unlikely story, given that it was not reported in any of the newspaper stories about the hanging. Tom Dula’s banjo playing during the War Between the States is legendary, but there is no evidence that he ever played the banjo, so his banjo playing is, in fact, just a legend; however, he did play the fiddle -- several people testified to that, & he made one trip to the Melton cabin specifically to retrieve his fiddle.

☞As Tom Dooley stood on the gallows facing death, he spoke for almost an hour, regaling the assembled multitude with tales about his childhood, about politics, & about all of the people who had perjured themselves at his trial. He neither confessed to the murder nor exonerated Ann Melton. He is reported to have said, “Gentlemen, do you see this hand? I didn’t harm a hair on the girl’s head.” He also admonished the young men in the audience to “stay clear of fiddlin’, women, & whiskey.” Allegedly, Tom Dooley’s last words were, “You have such a nice clean rope, I ought to have washed my neck.”

☞Despite the legend that Tom Dooley wrote his own murder ballad, the composition is generally credited to a local poet named Thomas Land. Several recordings were made of the song during the 20th Century, with the first in 1929 by a group called “Grayson & Whitter.” The most popular & well-known version, recorded by The Kingston Trio in 1958, sold over six million copies & is widely credited with initiating the “Folk Music Revival” of the 1960s.

☞The Kingston Trio’s 1958 recording of “Tom Dooley” had an unprecedented impact on American musical tastes. The Kingston Trio sold nearly six million copies of “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley,” found themselves on the cover of “Life Magazine,” & won the first Grammy ever awarded for a Country & Western Performance. Between 1958 & the 1964 British Invasion, Folk songs & original songs in the style of Folk songs experienced unprecedented popularity. At one point in the 1960s, the trio had four of the 10 top-selling albums in the nation at the same time -- a feat never duplicated even by the Beatles. One measure of the impact of the Folk Revival is the fact that in 1963 guitars outsold pianos in the United States for the first time in the 20th Century.

☞Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley has been named by the Grammy Foundation as one of the “Songs of the Century.”

☞Submitted for your approval is the following information, which we have discovered whilst perusing many a quaint & curious volume of forgotten lore:

☞Note that the Ballad of Tom Dooley contains the following verse:

Come this time tomorrow,

Reckon where I’ll be?

If it hadn’t have been for Grayson,

I’d have been in Tennessee.

☞Also note that the name “Grayson” mentioned in this verse refers to Colonel James Grayson (1833–1901), a Union Army officer who helped to organize an anti-Confederate uprising in Carter County, Tennessee at the outbreak of the War Between the States & who later aided in the capture of Tom Dula.

☞It is curiously interesting that fiddler Gilliam Banmon Grayson (1887-1930), who sings & plays the fiddle on the first-ever recording of Tom Dooley by Grayson & Whitter in 1929, is a nephew of Colonel Grayson who is mentioned in the ballad; therefore, in the recording Gilliam is singing about his own uncle’s part in the story of Tom Dula.

☞The left-hand photograph depicts a Confederate soldier who is is alleged to be Thomas Caleb Dula, although historians have so far been unable to authenticate the photograph with any great degree of certainty. The right-hand photograph depicts the cover-sleeve art of the Kingston Trio's 1958 seven-inch, 45-rpm-single recording of “Tom Dooley.”