Caught My Ear: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Booth Killed Lincoln”

For many years, the song “Booth” or “Booth Killed Lincoln” has been considered a prime example of a traditional ballad about a historical event. Telling in remarkable detail the story of John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln in 1865, the ballad seems ripped from contemporary headlines. Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who sang the song for the Library of Congress in 1949, has been credited as the song’s collector, and many sources indicate a date of about 1890 as the latest possible origin for the song, since Lunsford said he heard his father sing “some of the stanzas” to the fiddle tune “Booth.” But is there another possible explanation of the song’s origins? In this post, we’ll look more closely at Lunsford’s various recordings of “Booth,” as well as unpublished primary-source and secondary-source evidence in the AFC archive, to try to piece together the birth of “Booth.”

The 1949 Recording of “Booth” and Its Impact

Lunsford’s ballad “Booth” was recorded by the head of the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song, Duncan Emrich, during a marathon set of sessions in which Lunsford, a North Carolina musician, collector, and festival organizer, sang over 300 songs. Emrich’s invitation to Lunsford reflected Lunsford’s reputation as the most important collector of folksongs in the Appalachians. Lunsford generally collected songs not on discs or in manuscript but by simply learning them. Therefore, preserving what Lunsford called his “memory collection” required help from other collectors to fix them in recorded form. In fact, it was not the first time Lunsford had tried recording his entire repertoire; in 1935, he had done much the same at Columbia University, and AFC has copies of those earlier recordings as well.

Emrich was particularly pleased with his 1949 harvest of songs from Lunsford, and in 1952 released the LP numbered AFS 29, Songs and Ballads of American History and of the Assassination of Presidents, featuring five recordings from Lunsford, including the ballad “Booth.” In the liner notes to AFS 29, Emrich wrote:

“All of the songs of assassination are sung by Bascom Lamar Lunsford of South Turkey Creek, Leicester, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Mr. Lunsford has, from his youth, been an avid amateur collector of the folksongs of the North Carolina mountain area and of neighboring Kentucky. He at first, like his neighbors, merely acquired the songs in the virtually unselfconscious manner in which folklore passes from one person to another, but as collectors like R. W. Gordon began invading the hills, he recognized from them the deeper worth of the materials at hand, and began himself the systematic collection of local and traditional songs. Using the fiddle and banjo which he had learned to play as a young man, he still continued to sing the songs in the traditional, untrained manner to which he had been accustomed. Over a period of years, he has built up his own collection of folksongs gathered from friends and neighbors in North Carolina –none of them from print — and, prior to 1949, he very kindly recorded a number of them for Columbia University (aluminum discs) and for the Library of Congress. In 1949, it seemed desirable to rerecord those which he had done in the past as well as adding others not previously recorded. Upon our invitation he visited Washington for a week’s time in March, 1949, and recorded for the collections of the Library of Congress —and for the American people –over 350 traditional folksongs and ballads. For his willing and selfless cooperation, as well as for his foresightedness in preserving the songs of his own region, we owe him a marked debt of gratitude.”

Emrich released the “Booth” ballad on the LP and printed the words in the liner notes. you can hear it in the player below, and follow along with the lyrics below that.

“The title of this ballad is ‘Booth,’ or ‘Booth Killed Lincoln.’ It’s an old fiddle tune, and there are a few variants of the song. I heard my father hum it and sing a few of the stanzas when I was just a boy about six or ten years old.”

Wilkes Booth came to Washington,
An actor great was he,
He played at Ford’s Theater,
And Lincoln went to see.

It was early in April,
Not many weeks ago,
The people of this fair city
All gathered at the show.

The war it is all over,
The people happy now,
And Abraham Lincoln
Arose to make his bow;

The people cheer him wildly,
Arising to their feet,
And Lincoln waving of his hand,
He calmly takes his seat.

And while he sees the play go on,
His thoughts are running deep,
His darling wife, close by his side,
Has fallen fast asleep.

From the box there hangs a flag,
It is not the Stars and Bars,
The flag that holds within its folds
Bright gleaming Stripes and Stars.

J. Wilkes Booth, he moves down the aisle,
He had measured once before,
He passes Lincoln’s bodyguard
A-nodding at the door.

He holds a dagger in his right hand,
A pistol in his left,
He shoots poor Lincoln in the temple,
And sends his soul to rest.

The wife awakes from slumber,
And screams in her rage,
Booth jumps over the railing
And lands him on the stage.

He’ll rue the day, he’ll rue the hour,
As God him life shall give,
When Booth stood in the center stage,
Crying, “Tyrants shall not live!”

The people all excited then,
Cried everyone, “A hand!”
Cried all the people near,
“For God’s sake, save that man!”

Then Booth ran back with boot and spur
Across the backstage floor,
He mounts that trusty claybank mare,
All saddled at the door.

J. Wilkes Booth, in his last play,
All dressed in broadcloth deep,
He gallops down the alleyway,
I hear those horses feet.

Poor Lincoln then was heard to say,
And all has gone to rest,
“Of all the actors in this town,
I loved Wilkes Booth the best.”

Searching for the Roots of “Booth”

In his 1952 liner notes, Emrich points out internal evidence in the song which, he feels, establishes that it was composed only a few weeks after the assassination:

“Worthy of note also is the use of the historical present tense in the account of ‘Booth Killed Lincoln,’ a usage not uncommon in the ballad. The contemporary nature of the song –‘not many weeks ago’ –is interesting, as is also the fact that the contemporary time reference bas been retained in the passage of the song to us.

In stating that Lunsford had learned hundreds of songs, “none of them from print,” Emrich further records his belief that Lunsford had learned the “Booth” ballad orally. Thus, Emrich evidently believed the “Booth” ballad was one of the “traditional folksongs and ballads” of Lunsford’s region.

Other scholars and collectors followed Emrich in identifying “Booth” as a traditional ballad. Irwin Silber, in the liner notes to the 1960 LP Songs of the Civil War, called Lunsford’s “Booth” “an interesting example of the folk song as legend.” In his book Songs of the Civil War, Silber said more about the ballad. It’s interesting that Silber, like Emrich, picked out textual details that for him establish the song’s “true folk” authenticity:

“This haunting folk ballad of the most dramatic and most tragic political assassination in American history comes from the family of the noted folksinger-collector, Bascom Lamar Lunsford of South Turkey Creek, North Carolina. […] In the fashion of true folk symmetry, reminiscent of the tragic note of irony so frequent in the old ballads, the last stanza has Lincoln’s thoroughly unfactual dying words: ‘Of all the actors in this town, I loved Wilkes Booth the best.'”

Emrich was the head of the Folklore Section of the Library of Congress, Silber the founder and editor Sing Out! magazine. They were among the era’s leading authorities on folksong and influential with musicians, scholars, and audiences alike. Once they accepted the “Booth” ballad as a 19th century folksong, most others did too, including singers and old-time musicians. Thus, to pick just two examples from the wilds of the internet, banjo player Erich Schroeder of the Burr Oak String Band says: “The song ‘Booth Shot Lincoln’ aka ‘Booth Killed Lincoln’ was originally a broadside ballad, probably written within days of the actual event.” The singers at Town Common Songs claim that Bascom Lamar Lunsford said his father sang the ballad around 1890.

To take the last point first, it’s reasonable to interpret Lunsford’s words to mean that he learned the song from his father, but Lunsford didn’t actually say that. He said that there were “a few variants of the song,” and that his father “hummed” it and sang “a few of the stanzas.” That leaves us with more questions than answers. Lunsford pointedly did NOT say that he got a complete 14-stanza ballad from his father. If his father only sang “a few of the stanzas,” where did Lunsford get the complete ballad? If the song had “a few variants,” were any of the stanzas of Lunsford’s ballad among the ones his father sang, or did his father sing stanzas belonging to other variants of the Booth song?

Lunsford doesn’t answer these questions. In fact, his statement sounds almost purposely vague on the question of his source for the highly developed 14-verse “Booth” ballad.

To address Schroeder’s claim next, I too assumed that the song was a broadside ballad, and expected to be able to locate a broadside printing of the song. But as far as I can tell, the great collections of American broadsides, such as the Kenneth S. Goldstein collection, contain no example of such a broadside, nor does the Library of Congress seem to have one among its many song sheets. “Booth” has been indexed by the Roud Folk Song Index, which refers to all broadsides known to the editors in indexing each song, but it too fails to list a broadside of “Booth.” If there ever was such a broadside, it has so far vanished without a trace.

Similarly, I searched all the relevant newspaper indexes provided to researchers and staff at the Library of Congress, and found no evidence of a similar text printed in a newspaper. Finally, the huge text base of Google Books finds no evidence of the ballad in a book or other printed matter before Lunsford’s recording.

As more and more material has become digitized and searchable, it has become less and less plausible that this text was composed and printed in 1865 or soon after without leaving a trace in the printed record until 1952. That the ballad originated in a print source was certainly plausible when Emrich and Silber were writing, but not nearly as plausible today.

This leaves us with a few possibilities: the “Booth” ballad was never written down, but came down to Bascom Lunsford from its author purely orally; it came to Lunsford in writing in a unique manuscript; or it was written by Lunsford himself.

Other Recordings and Reports of “Booth”

Bascom Lamar Lunsford recorded “Booth” at least three times on recordings we have at the AFC archive. Examining the development of his ballad might shed light on its source.

It would also be useful to know what Lunsford meant by “there were a few variants of the song.” If other variants show a marked resemblance to the ballad, we would generally conclude that they and the ballad had a common source, and that might help us to track down that source. Thus, it would be good to hear what some of these variants sound like. It seems, then, that tracking down the roots of Lunsford’s “Booth” requires a look at his recordings, as well as an examination of other recordings and texts of songs Lunsford might consider variants of the Booth song.

One thing that Lunsford and all other commentators agree on is that “Booth” is a fiddle tune, and that the Booth song is sung to a version of the fiddle tune’s melody. So after looking at Lunsford’s recordings, we’ll examine other versions of the fiddle tune and any words associated with them.

To begin with Lunsford’s three recordings of “Booth,” the first took place while Lunsford was working with Robert Winslow Gordon during Gordon’s recording trip to North Carolina in 1925. You can hear it in the player below.

As you can see, the “Booth” recorded from Lunsford by Gordon in 1925 was just a fiddle tune with no words. Given that Gordon was far more interested in songs than fiddle tunes, and that Lunsford knew this, it seems strange that Lunsford wouldn’t record the song for Gordon, unless he didn’t know it yet. This leads me to believe that Lunsford learned the “Booth” ballad after 1925.

The 1935 Columbia University recording is also fascinating, in that the words to the ballad differ from what Lunsford sang in 1949. Hear it in the player below, and see my transcription below that.

[Fiddle tune]

Wilkes Booth came to Washington,
An actor great was he,
He played in Ford’s Theater,
And Lincoln went to see.

It was a night in April,
Not many weeks ago,
The people of this fair city
All gathered at the show.

The war it is all over,
The people happy now,
And Abraham Lincoln
Arose to make his bow;

The people cheer him wildly,
Arising to their feet,
And Lincoln waving of his hand,
He calmly takes his seat.

And while he sees the play go on,
His thoughts are running deep,
His darling wife, close by her side,
Has fallen fast asleep.

From the box there hangs a flag,
It’s not the Stars and Bars,
The flag that holds within its folds
Bright gleaming Stripes and Stars.

J. Wilkes Booth, moves down the aisle,
He’d measured once before,
He passes Lincoln’s bodyguard
A-nodding at the door.

He holds a dirk in his right hand,
A pistol in his left,
He shoots poor Lincoln in the temple,
And sends his soul to rest.

The wife awakes from slumber,
And screaming in her rage,
As Booth jumps over the railing
And lands him on the stage.

He’ll rue the day, he’ll rue the hour,
As God him life may give,
When Booth stood in the center stage,
Crying, “Tyrants shall not live!”

Then Rathbone in a trembling voice
And with a bleeding hand
Cries to all the people near,
“For God’s sake, stop that man!”

Then Booth went with boot and spur
Across the backstage floor,
He mounts that trusty claybank mare
All saddled at the door.

J. Wilkes Booth, in his last play
All dressed in broadcloth deep,
He gallops down the alleyway
I hear the horse’s feet.

Poor Lincoln then was heard to say,
As he had gone to rest,
“Of all the actors in this town,
I loved Wilkes Booth the best.”

[Spoken] I’ve known the tune Wilkes Booth since a boy….

Looking at this 1935 text, there are some mildly interesting and some very interesting differences from the better known 1949 recording. Mildly interesting is that he said “dirk” in 1935 but “dagger” in 1949. He also made some mistakes in 1935 that he didn’t make in 1949. “By her side” should be, as in 1949, “by his side,” for example. However, in general this text seems just as coherent.

Especially interesting is the 11th verse. In 1949, this verse ran:

The people all excited then,
Cried everyone, “A hand!”
Cried all the people near,
“For God’s sake, save that man!”

This verse always struck me as strange, in that it was president Lincoln who needed to be saved, and we wouldn’t expect people to refer to him as “that man,” crying “save that man” as opposed to “someone help the president!” (Also, to risk being pedantic, as Booth made his escape, no one knew the president had been shot except the three people in his box, which was barred from the inside, and there was no one for them to cry to who could lend a hand.)

As we’ll see, however, someone DID famously cry “stop that man” into the crowd as Booth fled. I have therefore always thought that Lunsford got the verse confused and that an earlier form of the line had included the words “stop that man.”

We find confirmation of my suspicion in the 1935 version of that stanza:

Then Rathbone with a trembling voice
And with a bleeding hand
Cries to all the people near,
“For God’s sake, stop that man!”

To revisit for a moment the history of the Lincoln assassination, on that fateful evening, Lincoln had guests in his box at Ford’s Theater, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris. Rathbone, who was unaware of Booth’s presence in the box until after he shot the president, immediately attempted to stop the assassin. Booth attacked him with the dagger (dirk) and cut him nearly to the bone, severing an artery in his arm. Booth then jumped from the box to the stage. According to Rathbone’s own testimony at Booth’s trial: “As he went over upon the stage, I cried out with a loud voice, ‘Stop that man!'” The wounded Rathbone then turned to help the president, and realizing he needed medical assistance, unbarred the door (which Booth had barred after sneaking in) to admit doctors who were already attempting to get in. Rathbone stayed to help Mrs. Lincoln, and once the president was carried across the street, Rathbone escorted Mrs. Lincoln out of the theater and into the house where they had taken the President. He then passed out from blood loss. The “trembling voice” and “bleeding hand” ascribed to the ballad Rathbone as he cries “for God’s sake, stop that man,” are thus quite accurate to what occurred on the night of the assassination, in any case far more accurate than the 1949 version of the verse.

Also interesting are Lunsford’s words after the ballad: “I’ve known the tune ‘Wilkes Booth’ since a boy.” Interestingly, just as he did in 1949, in 1935 Lunsford stated that he had known the TUNE since childhood, but said nothing about where he got his highly developed ballad text.

It’s also interesting to compare the two versions of the “Booth” ballad musically. For ease of reference, let’s divide the tune into an A part and a B part, with the A part running from 10 to 21 seconds of the 1935 recording, and then repeated from 21 to 29 seconds, and the B part running from 29 to 36 seconds. In the 1935 recording, Lunsford alternates regularly between the A and B parts: Odd verses are sung to the A part and even verses to the B part. The only exception to this is verse 12, resulting in 3 A-part verses in a row (11, 12, and 13). (This could have been because Lunsford forgot to use the B part for verse 12, or it could have been an artistic choice since it results in verse 14 standing out more and sounding more final.)

The 1949 version is musically much more tentative. Lunsford begins the song with two verses on the A part, then sings verse 3 on the B part. He continues using mostly the A part, but on verses 6, 9, and 14 he sings something in between the two strains, not quite reaching the high notes of the B part, and seeming generally unsure of the tune. As a singer myself, I’d attribute the tentative nature of this performance to Lunsford’s being out of practice on the song. I’d also note that in the 1935 session Lunsford played the fiddle tune before singing. This was a wise move, since hearing the tune before beginning to sing can help singers to fix the melody in their minds. In 1949 he played the fiddle tune AFTER singing the song, which was a tactical error from a singer’s perspective!

Lunsford’s 1935 recording session also includes a completely different version of the “Booth” song, which sheds light on his claim that it existed in “several variants.” Because there are racist words in this text, I haven’t included it in the audio in this blog, but researchers can hear it in the Folklife Research Center at the Library of Congress. My expurgated transcript is below:

[Spoken] I secured a text from W.J. Morgan of Pennsylvania County some seven years ago with different phraseology, which I’ll use in my next number.

[Fiddle tune]

Booth he shot poor Lincoln
He shot him on the sly
Lincoln, poor man,
I’m sorry he had to die

[N-s] were under bondage
Until in ‘63
Then Mr. Lincoln quickly
He quickly set them free

The dark clouds arrivin’
I’m sure it’s gonna rain
It’s nothing but the [D-s]
A coming down the lane

As we can see, this text is nothing like the ballad, and includes no lines with any real similarity to it. It’s interesting in its own way: in addition to the epithets, it displays animosity toward Black people, emancipation, and Lincoln in other, more subtle, ways. “I’m sorry he had to die,” for example, isn’t quite the same as “I’m sorry he died,” and expressing the idea that Lincoln “had to die” in conjunction with his action in ending the institution of slavery certainly suggests pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery origins. Of course, likening Black people to “dark clouds” suggests hostility too. It would be impossible for Lunsford to miss these signs, coming as he did from Madison County, which was sharply divided between supporters of the Union and the Confederacy, and having had such divisions in his own family. In giving the specific name and location of the person from whom he learned this version of the song, he may even have been disavowing these pro-Confederate and racist sentiments by making it clear the song was someone else’s.

There are several other recordings and transcriptions of “Booth” songs sung to the fiddle tune by singers other than Lunsford. Robert Winslow Gordon recorded one from John Weaver in Landrum, South Carolina, which you can hear in the player below:

Weaver’s words seem to be:

Booth he killed the president
Don’t you think it a shame?
Booth he killed the president
And Lincoln was his name

Mike Yates also reports recording a version from singer and banjo player Dan Tate, in Fancy Gap, Virginia, to a tune similar to the “Booth” fiddle tune:

All the people in this town,
They did weep and they did frown;
When they heard the news come down
That Booth shot Lincoln dead.

Finally, Andrew Kuntz’s The Fiddler’s Companion reports another version, which runs:

There’s treason, boys, in Washington.
John Wilkes Booth has fled.
Abe Lincoln’s lyin’ cold and dead
With a bullet in his head.
Bring the traitors in, boys,
Bring the traitors in.
Bring the traitors in, boys,
Bring the traitors in.

As we can see, none of the verses of “Booth Shot Lincoln” collected from other singers resemble Lunsford’s ballad in the least, and in fact no singer’s verses resemble any other singer’s. They are much more like the humorous or lyrical lines that accompany other fiddle tunes such as “Granny Will Your Dog Bite” and “Old Joe Clark,” tunes for which many people have made up verses over the years. Starting with just the title of “Booth Killed Lincoln” or “Booth Shot Lincoln” as a prompt, any good fiddler or singer could come up with a verse like John Weaver’s.

Given this, let’s look back at Lunsford’s 1949 statement: “It’s an old fiddle tune, and there are a few variants of the song. I heard my father hum it and sing a few of the stanzas when I was just a boy about six or ten years old.” From what we know now about the “Booth Shot Lincoln” corpus, it seems quite plausible that Lunsford’s father sang stanzas unrelated to the ballad.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s three recordings of “Booth” leave us with the following probable timeline: sometime around 1890, Lunsford first heard the fiddle tune “Booth,” in the form of humming and singing of some verses by his father. Sometime before 1925, he learned to play the fiddle tune, but he did not yet know the ballad in 1925. By 1935 he had learned the ballad. By 1949, he had either changed it intentionally or he remembered it imperfectly, leaving Major Rathbone out of the story. In 1935 he sang it more confidently than in 1949, suggesting perhaps that it was not a song he sang often.

Unfortunately, while we now know more about when Lunsford picked up this remarkable ballad text, we don’t know anything about where or from whom he learned it. It would still be possible, of course, for the song to have been created in 1865, transmitted entirely orally, and collected only by Lunsford, and for him then to have recorded it several times without ever divulging where he got it. That would be consistent with there being no recorded version until 1935, and no printed version until the 1952 liner notes.

However, at this point in our research I feel we need to seriously consider the idea that Lunsford himself wrote the song. For one thing, he was known as a songwriter. His most famous composition, “Good Old Mountain Dew” was recorded by Lunsford himself for Brunswick Records in 1928. A 1935 adaptation by Lunsford’s friend Scotty Wiseman has been recorded by many country stars, from Grandpa Jones to Willie Nelson. Lunsford also recorded his original version of this song for Emrich, and you can hear that in the player below.

The apparent absence of any text of the Booth ballad from the printed record, Lunsford’s own vagueness as to how he learned it, and the fact that he did write songs which sound convincingly traditional, all make it plausible that Lunsford himself wrote the “Booth” song. Looking for sources that might shed further light on Lunsford’s repertoire leads us to an unpublished source that just might hold the answers: the Masters degree thesis of Anne Winsmore Beard.

Anne Winsmore Beard’s Masters Thesis

Anne Winsmore Beard’s 1959 Masters Thesis, titled The Personal Folksong Collection of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, is essentially an annotated transcript of Lunsford’s 1935 Columbia University recordings. The words were transcribed by Lunsford’s daughter Nelle, identified in the text as “Mrs. J. J. Greenawald.” (The text also states that the tunes were transcribed by Lunsford’s friend Scotty Wiseman, but in fact no musical transcriptions appear in AFC’s copy of the thesis.) The introduction and song notes, constituting the original work of the thesis, were written by Beard.

Beard places “Booth” in a section of the thesis devoted to songs written by Lunsford. Her note on “Booth” confirms the suspicions I expressed above. Here is the relevant portion of the note:

“Lunsford wrote this ballad to an old tune, familiar to most fiddlers as ‘Booth,’ or ‘Booth Killed Lincoln.’ He made the song sometime between 1925 and 1935 but is unable to remember the exact date because he never used it or sang it much. He first heard the tune hummed by his mother and father, and later heard it played by his fiddler-uncle, S.O. Deaver.”

Note that Lunsford’s statements about having learned the tune (but not the words) from his father are confirmed by this new information. Lunsford was being truthful when he spoke about the ballad to Emrich, but not thorough. Beard adds that Lunsford’s mother and his uncle Squire Osborne “Os” Deaver also knew the tune–all of which makes sense.

As for the rest, it’s remarkable how exactly this comports with my earlier observations. Lunsford wrote the song between his 1925 recording for Gordon (when he apparently knew no words to the tune) and his 1935 recording for Columbia University. The fact that he never sang it much explains the tentative nature of his singing on the 1949 recording, when he had trouble with both words and tune, and forgot the details of the Rathbone verse. All in all, Beard’s statements make perfect sense in light of AFC’s recordings of “Booth.”

Beard doesn’t give her specific source for her knowledge about the song and the tune, but in general she drew on four major categories of sources for the thesis: standard printed folksong collections and scholarship; Lunsford’s spoken statements on the Columbia discs and on recordings at Miami University; Lunsford’s personal notebooks, which he loaned to her for research purposes; and two personal interviews with Lunsford in August 1958 and March 1959.

According to Lunsford scholar Loyal Jones, Lunsford’s notebooks were lost in the mail when Beard attempted to return them, so they are no longer in Lunsford’s family and may have been destroyed. Jones attempted to find Beard herself and interview her, but was unsuccessful.

My own research indicates that an Anne Winsmore Beard, daughter of Eugenia Lecompte Beard and Joseph Breckenridge Beard, died in Kenton, Kentucky in 1996. I believe this Anne Winsmore Beard to be the author of the thesis. She was born in 1934, which would make her 25 at the time of the Masters thesis. She was a Benedictine nun at the time of her death; her religious vocation might explain why she ceased to be an active folksong scholar, and why Loyal Jones was unable to find her in the 1980s. Finally, she died in Kenton, only about 60 miles from Miami University.

Given that the notebooks are likely lost and Beard is likely gone, we may never know if Beard’s information about “Booth” came from a notebook or a personal interview. However, the specific statement that Lunsford was “unable to remember the exact date because he never used it or sang it much” suggests it came from one of the interviews.

We can also have high confidence in Beard’s finding because Lunsford himself was very much alive in 1959 and very much involved in Beard’s thesis. According to the thesis itself, her advisor at Miami University, John Ball, was working closely with Lunsford at the time. She wrote it with the certainty that Lunsford would read it, and the idea that she would say anything so definitive without checking with him is simply inconceivable. In all, then, it seems quite clear that Lunsford wrote the words to the “Booth” ballad.

Conclusion

I have no doubt that some Lunsford scholars and some musicians have already realized that Lunsford wrote the “Booth” ballad; thorough researchers are probably aware of Beard’s thesis and recognize its implications. Still, the song is credited as a traditional folk song in many different places: standard sources like the Traditional Ballad Index and the Roud Folk Song Index; more commercial sites such as Second Hand Songs; books such as American Murder Ballads by Olive Woolley Burt, as well as Silber’s Songs of the Civil War; and liner notes, including Silber’s notes and our own notes from AFS 29. Moreover, as we’ve seen, the internet is full of sites confidently declaring the song a broadside ballad and indicating that Lunsford learned it from his father around 1890. Although Lunsford seemed uncomfortable in 1935 and in 1949 revealing his authorship of the ballad, Beard’s thesis suggests that by 1959 he was willing to let it be known that he wrote the song.

For all these reasons, it’s worth publishing this in Folklife Today. For researchers and music fans alike, it provides the audio of Lunsford’s previous recordings of “Booth,” along with transcriptions and notes. It provides what we hope will become a prominent acknowledgement of Anne Winsmore Beard’s important but unpublished work. Most of all, it acknowledges Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s authorship of a classic ballad, which he called “Booth” or “Booth Killed Lincoln.”