Booth Shot Lincoln: A Song History

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On the night of April 14, 1865, the actor John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.[1][2] Lincoln was carried to the Petersen House and died there at 7:22 the next morning, aged 56.[1] "Booth Shot Lincoln" is a fiddle tune named for the event. Set in A major, it was played by western North Carolina fiddlers such as Osey Helton and Marcus Martin, and by Tommy Magness of north Georgia, in standard tuning or in cross-tunings.[2]

1865 photograph of Ford's Theatre in Washington, with black mourning drapery hung across the front

“Ford’s Theatre, scene of the assassination,” albumen photograph, 1865. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The tune is closely tied to Bascom Lamar Lunsford of Buncombe County, North Carolina. When Robert Winslow Gordon recorded him in 1925, his "Booth" was an instrumental with no words. By 1935 Lunsford was singing a ballad to it, "Booth Killed Lincoln," and he recorded that again for Duncan Emrich of the Library of Congress in 1949.[3][4] Lunsford said he had heard his father hum it and sing some verses when he was a small boy, and writers such as Duncan Emrich and Irwin Silber assumed the ballad dated from about 1865.[3] A 1959 master's thesis by Anne Winsmore Beard, however, records that Lunsford made up the words himself between 1925 and 1935, setting them to the old fiddle tune. Searching broadside collections, newspaper indexes and digitized books, folklorist Stephen Winick found no printing of the ballad before Lunsford recorded it.[3]

Other "Booth" songs with words quite unlike Lunsford's have turned up too: Gordon recorded one from John Weaver of Landrum, South Carolina, and Mike Yates reported one from Dan Tate of Fancy Gap, Virginia, sung to a tune resembling the fiddle tune.[3] The tune has been printed in fiddle collections such as Phillips's Traditional American Fiddle Tunes, Vol. 1 (1994).[2] Stephen Seifert includes it in his mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[5]

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Sources

  1. National Park Service, Ford's Theatre National Historic Site: "The Petersen House".
  2. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Booth Shot Lincoln (1)".
  3. Library of Congress, Folklife Today (Stephen Winick): "Caught My Ear: Bascom Lamar Lunsford's 'Booth Killed Lincoln'".
  4. Library of Congress: "Booth Killed Lincoln" (Bascom Lamar Lunsford, 1949).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".