Duet argued over who penned lyrics
BY BRAD BARNES
From: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/story/205828.html (link no longer works!)
It's "Columbus Stockade Blues," a song beloved by generations of folk musicians, country singers and bluegrass pickers.
This song is 80 years old this year. And although its popularity has faded in the past 40 years, there was a time it was so popular that anyone who listened to country or folk music knew its tune. Elvis Presley performed it. So did Woody Guthrie. And Willie Nelson:
The song is a hard luck story. There's a man behind bars, and there's a woman he can't be with. And maybe, to top it all off, she doesn't even want to be with him. "Go and leave me, if you wish to," he tells her. "In your heart you love some other. Leave me, darlin', I don't mind."
"Columbus Stockade Blues" made famous the unlikely Columbus-based duo who first recorded it, Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton. Darby gave the song its weathered, world-weary voice. Tarlton played a slide guitar in the background, adding a sound that was certainly no stranger to black blues music but was practically unheard of in white country songs until then.
The song also drove the two apart, most people think, due to conflicts over its authorship or the money it made for people who were named neither Darby nor Tarlton.
Both men claimed to have written the song. People who knew the musicians fall into different camps, and they've all got their anecdotal evidence to back them.
In truth, neither man might have been able to make the true claim of authorship.
Musicians meet
The two met in a music store in downtown Columbus, as the story goes.
The name of the store may be lost to history. Some suggest it was The White Co., an office supply store that sold books, Kodak cameras and other novelties. But surviving family of the Columbus institution say it didn't sell music.
Others think it was Humes Music Store on Broadway which had been selling music and instruments in the city since 1908. Through the first half of the 20th century, the store on the 1200 block of Broadway was filled with musical instruments, sheet music and thick platters of 78 rpm vinyl. A staff musician would play sheet music pieces on a piano to an audience that would gather in the store's basement.
Wherever they met, it's not hard to guess out how the two started talking. They shared an interest in music, and both grew up on farms.
Their history is well-documented in the liner notes accompanying the complete collection of the duo's recordings.
Tom Darby was born in Columbus in 1884. He was a farmhand and picked up other odd jobs as he could, finger-picking music on his guitar more or less as a hobby.
Jimmie Tarlton, a drifter and son of South Carolina sharecroppers, was eight years Darby's junior. He'd already seen much of the country, traveling with his guitar and buskin' music on sidewalks when he ended up in Columbus, in 1927.
Tarlton had played guitar since he was very young. He was 10 when he got the idea to set the instrument in his lap and use a knife handle to make his guitar melodies warble and weep. More than a decade later, he'd meet a Hawaiian guitarist named Frank Ferera who played similarly, and the two shared their tricks.
When a man at that music store suggested Tarlton and Darby team up together, they were 35 and 42, respectively. That same music store fellow took them to Atlanta with other promising Columbus musicians for an audition with Columbia Records.
Those audition recordings yielded two songs for Darby and Tarlton's first single on Columbia's country and hillbilly music imprint. One tune was a needling yarn called "Down in Florida on a Hog," backed with a tune called "Birmingham Town."
The duo returned to Atlanta in November 1927 for a full-fledged recording session, and Columbia issued "Birmingham Jail" backed with "Columbus Stockade Blues" on a 78, right between releases by the Macon Quartet ("Yodel"/"Uncle Joe") and Chris Bouchillon ("Bullfight in Mexico"/"Chris Visits the Barber Shop").
The label expected "Birmingham Jail" to be the big hit. But both songs became smashes, and "Stockade" is the one that proved to have staying power.
Not even the Columbus-based duo expected their record to be such a hit. If so, they never would have agreed to record it for the set price of $75 instead of a cut of the sales.
"Right after 'Columbus Stockade Blues' came out, they kind of blamed each other for not having a better recording contract on there," Whitley said.
Tarlton had wanted royalties. But Darby, who wanted the money up front, won the argument.
That decision was part of what strained their relationship, say followers. But there would be an even more divisive issue.
Authorship argument
"For whatever reason, they both claimed they wrote it, and that right there is probably what drove the wedge between them personally," said Henry Parker, a Columbus guitarist who befriended an elderly Jimmie Tarlton when Parker was in his 20s.
Whatever Tarlton may have insisted before he died, "my uncle wrote the song before he ever met Jimmie Tarlton," Whitley said.
Most people agree that Darby's the more likely author.
"Well look, Tom sang the song," said Rick Edwards of the Chattahoochee Folk Music Society. "Darby never sang lead on Tarlton's songs. Tarlton never sang lead on Darby's. So if that holds true, it was Darby's song."
Parker thinks they should've simply shared the credit and moved on.
"Look, you both were on it, so why not just let it be a collaboration?" he said. "Whoever wrote it, it wouldn't have been the song it was without Jimmie Tarlton playing slide, and I'll have to give Mr. Tom Darby the credit too, 'cause he sang very well on that song.
"So that was a collaboration all the way around. It was two instruments and two voices. They can't get away from that," Parker said.
There's perhaps another reason they shouldn't have bickered about authorship.
The evidence is compelling that neither of them wrote substantial portions of the song.
Dear Companion
Meg Baird's voice is sweet and clear, almost timeless as she sings the words.
Just go and leave me if you wish to.
It will never trouble me.
For in your heart, you love another,
and in my grave I'd rather die.
It's not "Columbus Stockade Blues," though it's similar in melody and lyric.
It's an Appalachian ballad called "Dear Companion." The Carter Family, most famously, sang a version of the song.
In the early 1900s, a man named Cecil Sharp traveled through the Appalachians collecting what he identified as English folk songs that had been passed down for hundreds of years among descendants of America's earliest settlers. The version he published was sung by a woman named Rosie Hensley in Carmen, N.C., in 1916.
[...]
But the similarities between the two songs certainly lend credence to the possibility that Tarlton might have brought the old song to Darby, who infused with it his idea of a man behind the bars of the Columbus Stockade.
[...]
Tarlton and Darby remained partners for years, despite the rift.
Columbia would release more than 60 songs by the two in the four years following "Columbus Stockade Blues."
By the end of 1930 though, Tarlton was recording as a solo artist and Darby had formed a band called the Georgia Wildcats. They recorded together again in 1932 and in 1933, and played together for shows at least into the 1940s.
Darby and Tarlton regrouped for what's believed to be the last time in 1963, when they celebrated the opening of the band shell in Weracoba Park.
About that time, Tarlton and his distinctive slide guitar were rediscovered in the wake of the nation's folk music explosion. He was invited to perform at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, along with Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, Chuck Berry, The Lovin' Spoonful, and a folk singer named Pete Seeger.
Parker met the elderly Tarlton in the mid-1970s, when the former star and his wife were living in a Phenix City housing project. Tarlton didn't even have a guitar, so Parker gave him his.
A few years ago, at an SOA Watch protest in Columbus, Pete Seeger—now a much older and more famous folk singer—played the "Columbus Stockade Blues" to the crowd and told a reporter, "Woody Guthrie taught me to sing that song."
Willie Nelson opened a show with it in the city's RiverCenter for the Performing Arts in 2003. Leon Russell played a rock 'n' roll version of it at a Broadway street party in 2004, under the watchful eye of Columbus police, ready to truck any ne'er-do-wells to the modern version of the stockade.
By then, both Darby and Tarlton were long dead. They died eight years apart: Darby in 1971 and Tarlton in 1979.
They're both buried in Riverdale Cemetery on Victory Drive.
They're not too close together. But they're not too far apart, either.