SONG BIO
It was my wife who cracked the concept on this one. Most of my best ideas are the ones I steal from her. Credit where credit is due.
Most people are familiar with the song “Tom Dooley.” If you only know one murder ballad (and two chords), this is probably the one you know. But the real-life story behind it is far less familiar, and it is this story upon which I base my song. I will summarize the story as I understand it here, paraphrasing heavily from “The Folk Songs of North America” by Alan Lomax, for your convenience.
Tom Dula returned to North Carolina after the Civil War, and became a serious womanizer, cutting “a wide swathe among the ladies” in his community. He took up with Laura Foster, from whom he caught what Lomax tactfully describes as “a disease.” I’m taking the liberty of adding my own interpretation to this, but I’m assuming it was syphilis, or something similarly sexually transmitted and hard to get rid of with the medicine of the day. He didn’t realize his infection until he had moved on to his next girl, Ann Melton. Lomax doesn’t specify, but I assume that Melton also contracted the disease, because they both immediately conspired to murder Laura Foster for revenge. Dula lured Laura out of town with promises to marry her; after he got her drunk and restrained her, Melton ambushed her with a knife, and they buried her in a shallow grave on a hillside. After the body was discovered about six weeks later, both Dula and Melton were arrested and charged with murder.
The trial was a mess from the beginning. Dula, very much in love and trying to defend his girl, refused to admit that Melton had been involved with the murder at all; and Melton’s disarming charm and considerable good looks made it difficult for the men of the jury to see her as the cold-blooded killer that she clearly was. In the end, Ann Melton got off relatively easily with a short prison sentence, while Tom Dula was sentenced to death by hanging. He wrote the song about his execution himself, conspicuously omitting any mention of Ann Melton in his lyric.
So, that’s the original story. My version of it is set in modern day New York City, and is unapologetically patterned after Law and Order: SVU. The outcome of this case changes radically with the introduction modern forensic technology; the detectives would have been able to put Melton at the crime scene, and her hand on the murder weapon, whether Dula testified or not. (I took the liberty of assuming that a modern-day Ann Melton would already have her prints in the system for previous offenses; I have no idea whether this accurately reflects her historical personality.)