13 - Songs and stories for Halloween

Been All Around This World

[Bed music:]

Sid Hemphill and band: The Death March (Quitman Co., Mississippi, August 1942).

Mr. & Mrs. Boyd Hoskins: Ah, Lovely Appearance of Death (Horse Creek, Clay Co., Kentucky, October 1942)

Bessie Jones: Oh Death (St. Simons Island, Georgia, October 1959)

Nimrod Workman: O Death (Mascot, Tennessee, July 1983)

Bessie Jones tells a story of a woman enduring a night’s worth of ghostly trials (NYC, October 1961)

Sheila Kay Adams: Little Margaret (Burton Cove, Sodom Laurel, Madison Co., North Carolina, September 1982)

Unidentified woman: funeral lament (Santo Stefano di Sessanio, Abruzzo, Italy, December 1954)

Liborio Garanfa (guitar) and Giuseppe Gavita (violin and vocal) (Scanno, Abruzzo, Italy, December 1954)

Almeda Riddle: The House Carpenter (Heber Springs, Arkansas, October 1959)

Jeannie Robertson: Bonny Annie and Andrew Lammie, followed by a story of her own encounter with a spirit (London, November 1953)

Texas Gladden tells a story of her grandfather’s experience in haunted house during the Civil War (Decca Studios, NYC, 1946)

We considered including these two relevant and wonderful pieces that aren’t directly Lomax-related – enjoy them here instead:

Burl Hammons: Turkey In the Straw, learned from an apparition, as he explains. (Recorded by Carl Fleischauer and Dwight Diller at Pocahontas Co., West Virginia, April 1970. Scroll down here for audio.)

Billie Maxwell: The Haunted Hunter (Victor Records session, El Paso, Texas, July 1929. Maxwell was a native of New Mexico, living at the time in Arizona.)