Music

Look At Her Cry

drumkit - gerald dowd
bass guitar - john abbey
wurlitzer - chris neville
vocal, elka, and baritone guitar - robbie fulks
electric guitar - grant tye
roland dark-matter generator - jay o'rourke

For some reason I had been reading a lot of big-name writers' depictions of lynching and other white-on-black violence around the same time. William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and so on. I was aware that revisiting the 1920s South musically in the present-day ran a variety of risks, but I pressed on, heedless, going through several drafts and a few completely different songs before beginning this one. It at once seemed like the right direction -- telling about a racial crime not through an omniscient narrator or an innocent victim (that really came out idiotic!) but in the voice of a potential malefactor, on the verge of making a choice, conflicted between what he registers as duty and some tiny, almost incoherent spark of enlightened skepticism. After that protracted start-up, the words and story actually came pretty fast. the Hope it holds your attention. I do think that melodrama and noir this and Gothic that, though probably too comfortable a mode by now, reflect an actuality in the life and mind of the American South.

Lyrics

Goddamn those niggers was singing one sorrowful song
The night the Fairview jail came down
Me and Bobby Reynolds was stock still, huddled in the smokehouse door
He said, “Son, this time we could swim or drown.”

When my Granddaddy set foot in Cullman County he was a wealthy man
Now the grass gathers on his home
And from the day that it fell, he lived so his epitaph might run:
“Gave Streight's men no rest from Day's Gap to Rome.”

When Tom Stone’s boys marched over the hill, the sheriff fired a shot
So they fell back amongst the trees
But back in his cell, Henry Phelps prayed to his nigra God
Knowing this sundown was the last he’d see

My Ida girl, take my sister Ida far away from here
To her uncle in Shelbyville
Against one iron lock and an oak plank Tom’ll have the upper hand
‘Cause there’s a hundred strong waiting in those hills

CHORUS:
Oh, the dry wind stirs as the day goes down
And the lamplights hang across the blood-baked ground
And the earth it beats as the men go by
And the trees so dark and the moon so high

Streight's men limped across the Black Creek bridge in the early morn
And their flames made a dreadful glow
But a child, they tell, she led Colonel Forrest to a backwoods ford
Just a few old tracks a Yankee map won’t show

Me and Bobby watched while they rammed that door till the lock swung loose
And dragged Henry Phelps outside
Sheriff spoke strong, but every man saw that it weren’t no use
Little Ida's shame was a mark too wide.

But for his kin Ida nothing in this world's nearer to a man
And my faith in you stands strong
And I do believe we shall be united with the things we’ve lost
By the power of God, and before too long.

Now Tom’s got Henry cuffed tight to the door of the Fairview jail
He’s crying, “Mr. Stone, somebody lied”
Oh but Henry knows well, there’s a little girl gone to Shelbyville
With his own black blood kicking deep inside

Now Forrest's laid up in Memphis, he long outlived the glorious cause
And Abel Streight as well is dead
And Lord I’m left standing in the ruins with a match in hand
And this ancient song rising in my head

Oh, the dry wind stirs as the day goes down
And the lamplights hang across the blood-baked ground
And the earth she beats as the men go by
And the trees so dark and the moon so high

Look at her cry
Look at her cry
Look at her cry
Look at her cry
Look at her cry
Look at her cry
Look at her cry

Guitar Chords/Tab

Guitar chords/tab are not available for this song