"Song - Ballets and Devil's Ditties"

X ß^?-, "Song -Ballets and Devil's Ditties" By WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY Commencement was over at Berea. The small town which has grown up about the college had subsided once more from its annual excitement, and at midnight hundreds of students, burdened with hand-baggage, were waiting, close packed, upon the platform of the country railroad station. It was a typical co-educational college crowd: shrill with feminine voices and boisterous with boyish high spirits—such as one might have seen almost anywhere. It was difficult to realize that we were in the very shadow of the romantic Kentucky Cumberlands—more difficult still to grasp the fact that most of these boys and girls with suit-cases, felt hats, loose coats and sweaters, college colors now darkly obscured in fluttering ribbon and flag, and all the other unmistakable insignia of American undergraduate life, were from those same mountains to which—and to the cabin and corn-field—they were now returning for their share in the summer's work. But on a soap-box against the sidewall of the station sat and old blind fiddler, white-haired beneath a battered hat. In the dark shadows, fitfully dispersed by the flaring of a torch whose staff was thrust into the ground so that the flame came only a few feet from his deeply lined face with its sunken, sightless sockets, he was sawing away, surrounded by a small circle of listeners. His voice, cracked and quavering, rose and fell rapidly in a nasal, monotonous sing-song. Yet the first words I heard arrested my attention. Suddenly all that had seemed familiar, conventional, and commonplace faded from the scene, and it would have been easier to fancy oneself in a corner of Defoe's London, listening to some peddler of broadsides proclaiming his wares, than on the edge of an American country college town in the twentieth century. For what the old minstrel sang was not some sentimental street song that had drifted down from the North, or a popular plantation melody. It was a very circumstantial account, crudely versified, of a local occurrence which, less than ten years ago, attracted the attention of the entire country to this eastern end of Kentucky . The assassination of the lawyer J. B. Marcum, in the court-house at Jackson, Breathitt County, brought to a climax the famous Hargis-Marcum feud; and for their share in it two men, Thomas White and Curtis Jett, were "penitentiaried" for life. The ballad to which we listened, related all the stages of this tragedy and its subsequent events. It began with the preparations, which were of the most deliberate 9 r¿r: 'S G^£ *~ Ni ^ 7·1 ? / 3,> "V ^->¡?! ^ ?,!. 1 IS SSs^nS 5D1KBJ *; r«. ira 2 u KK (-("«Ti 79»» 'S* SZ Sketch ofJackson, Kentucky, in "Bloody" Breathitt County sort, and painted the mood of expectancy which prevailed just before the fatal event. Then it described the actual killing itself: Marcum leaves a wife, To mourn all her life, And his little children stand it well and brave; But that little Curtis Jett, Thomas White, and others yet, Are the men who laid poor Marcum in his grave. As it happened, I had almost, as it were, a personal interest in the events that formed the theme of this epic minstrelsy. A friend had visited Jackson "town" just before the "killing"—never the "murder," in the mountains, —of Marcum, so I had often heard stories of his six weeks' sojourn in the county seat of "Bloody Breathitt," which a sensational preacher in the East once called "the wickedest place on earth" —a reputation of which this ramshackle mountain village is apparently proud. For its unique picture postcard, garishly colored, bears beneath its panoramic view the legend: "The Worlds (sic) Famous Jackson"; and if there is anything besides its feuds and assassinations for which Jackson is "world famous," we have yet to hear of it! My friend went there armed with a letter of introduction to the postmaster, who was a kinsman of Marcum's. 10 "I could send you up to Cousin Jim's," the latter said when he had read it. "He's well fixed to take...