The Legend of Tom Dooley In 1866, a woman named Laura Foster was murdered in Wilkes County. A man named Tom Dula, pronounced Dooley, was convicted and hanged for the crime. That murder and the name Tom Dooley live on in one of the most famous folk songs ever to come out of North Carolina. The traditional version of the story casts Tom Dula as a dashing, handsome confederate veteran. When Dula returns from the war, he meets Laura Foster, a young woman who was being courted by a schoolteacher from the North by the name of Bob Grayson. Foster fell in love with Tom Dula, but so did another woman, Anne Melton. Melton was married, wealthy, beautiful, and insanely jealous. Learning that Dula was in love with Foster, not her, Anne Melton stabbed Laura Foster to death in a jealous rage. Tom Dula was blamed for the murder. Tula fled, heading for Tennessee. Bob Grayson headed a posse to hunt down Tom Dula, and he was dragged back to Wilkes County. Dula, realizing that it was Anne Melton who committed the crime, confesses out of a chivalrous desire to save her from a death by hanging. On May 1, 1868, Tom Dula was executed for the murder of Laura Foster. Grayson returned home to the North. Anne Melton went slowly insane from guilt, and years later as she was on her deathbed, the trees around her house filled with back cats and the air was filled with the smell of burning flesh as demons came to take her soul to Hell. Its this version of the tale, a complicated story story that ends in the death of an innocent man, that became immortalized in a folk song that circulated in North Carolina for nearly 100 years before it was made nationally famous by the Kingston Trio in 1958. Their recording of the ballad Tom Dooley reached #1 on the Billboard R&B charts, and rose to the top of the country music charts. ts said that Tom Dooley wrote this song himself. The legged has it that he that he was signing it, strumming along on his banjo, as he sat on top of his own coffin riding in the wagon on the way to his execution. But the history behind the story of Tom Dula and the murder of Laura Foster are more than a little different from how he song tells it. youtube/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sZYjc57V55U
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 23:01:21 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015