CrimeSong: True Crime Stories From Southern Murder Ballads

Although these ballads and stories are set in specific times, cultures, and places, they present timeless, universal themes of love, betrayal, jealousy, and madness through true-life tales that are both terrifying and familiar stories that could be ripped from today s headlines.

In CrimeSong, law professor and authentic storyteller Richard H. Underwood recreates in engaging and folksy prose the true facts behind twenty-four Southern murder ballads. Underwood has resurrected these stories and shares them with the reader through his old lawyer trifocals.

He presents his case studies, documented through contemporary news accounts and court records, as a series of dramas filled with jump-off-the-page real and memorable characters.

Some of the murder ballads more familiar to readers, musicians, and fans of traditional, Appalachian, Bluegrass, and folk music include "Omie Wise," "Ellen Smith," "Frankie Silver," "Frankie and Albert" (or "Frankie and Johnny)," "Delia," "Tom Dula," "The Lawson Family Murders," and "Freda Bolt." Among the more obscure is the story of "General Denhardt" and the death of the widow Verna Garr Taylor, "who was known as the most beautiful woman in Oldham County, [Kentucky]." Also included, among others, is "Henry Clay Beattie," the 1911 murder in Richmond, Virginia, that "brought New York-style newspaper sensationalism to the South, like the coverage of the 1836 case of Helen Jewett and the 1841 case of Mary Rogers.