Delia – NEVERMIND MEDIA

A 14-year-old girl named Delia Green was shot to death on Christmas night in 1900 by a boy who thought she was being mean to him. How did that turn into a song about a “lowdown” and “trifling” woman who was cheating on her man — and a song that would save Johnny Cash’s career?

Purchase Sad13's rendition of “Delia” via Bandcamp now, and preorder the rest of the Songs In The Key Of Death EP

Show Notes And Transcript

Episode Transcript

In 1992, Johnny Cash was nobody and nowhere. He was down and out in Branson, Missouri — the family-friendly Vegas on the Mississippi River. That’s where country music careers go to die.

The music industry lost interest in Cash and he was dropped by his longtime label, Columbia Records. The Man in Black was irrelevant. He was an elder statesman in a world where neo-traditionalists held the mic in country music — instead of actual traditionalists. Things looked bleak. Then, along came Rick Rubin.

The founder of Def Jam Records and the man who produced bands from the Beastie Boys to Danzig, had an idea: Rubin would get Cash to record the classic songs he loved in a stripped down, straight shooting, and highly emotional style. It was a good match. Cash needed the career boost, and Rubin wanted to revitalize a legend. The plan led to a resurgence in popularity and the kind of cultural relevance that rebooted Cash’s career. He was saved.

Audiences fell in love with covers of “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails and “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode, which defined Cash’s late career. But it was singing about Delia Green that really kick started Cash.

Delia wasn’t a rockstar, a songwriter, or a musician at all. She was the subject of a dark murder ballad called “Delia’s Gone.” Cash originally recorded the song, a folk and blues standard, in 1962.

When it comes to singing about murder, Johnny Cash’s audience just can’t get enough. Who can blame 'em? Especially with provocative lyrics like "She was low down and trifling / And she was cold and mean / Kind of evil, make me want to / Grab my sub machine / Delia's gone, one more round / Delia's gone.”

I’m Courtney E. Smith, and you’re listening to Songs in the Key of Death, a show about murder ballads and the true crimes that inspired them. This is The Story Of Delia Green, Who Is Not The Girl You Think You Know.

That song — along with a video shot by Anton Corbjin that featured Kate Moss as the low down and trifling Delia — breathed life into Cash’s floundering career. In the video, he’s absolutely unhinged, embracing the soul of a serial killer. He embodies the kind of man who loathes women, who plots out meticulously how he’ll kill them, driving across the country to do it for nothing more than a slight that might be real or might be imagined. While his original version of Delia in the ‘60s was dark, somehow the version he recorded in the ‘90 took the song to a cold-blooded place, making a harrowing story even more graphic and gruesome — and pushing it further from the truth.

While Cash and Delia have a lot of history, songs about her have been around for even longer — over a hundred years. Delia’s story is part of the long legacy of murder ballads. Ballads are poems set to music that tell a story. They traveled from town to town, thanks to balladeers roaming the countryside, playing tunes and telling tales. And broadsheet printers who sold the songs and taught locals how to sing them. Murder ballads, are a subset of that oral tradition, recounting real stories of deaths too haunting to be forgotten.

Delia has been a muse to blues, folk, and country singers. She’s the reason we have hundreds of versions of Delia songs performed by artists as varied as Blind Willie McTell, Bob Dylan, and Pat Boone. Songs about Delia have existed for a long time but they don’t tell us anything about the real girl they’re based on. All the songs about Delia get her wrong by telling the story from the point of view of her killer. The girl who inspired those songs wasn’t at all like the character that all these men, and they were all men, made her out to be. Delia wasn’t low down or trifling, and certainly not cold. But her death came at the hands of a boy who thought she was being mean to him.

The real Delia Green — she was a Black, 14-year-old girl who was having a very bad Christmas back in 1900. She was at the home of her employers, Willie and Emma West, for a party. She was a scrub girl there and lived just across the street in Yamacraw, a neighborhood near downtown Savannah. Yamacraw was then, as it is now, thought of as a high crime area but — given what we know about over policing and white fear of Black people in America, it was probably just a neighborhood to Delia.

At the trial for her murder, there were conflicting reports about what happened at that party. The house may have been a “rough” one — a hub for gambling, drinking, and prostitution. Depending on who you listen to, there could’ve been a quiet group of neighbors singing hymns and Christmas songs around the piano — or a rowdy group of 40, partying and getting wasted. And the boy who shot Delia may have been drunk.

What we know is that it was a crime of passion. Willie West sent his gun out for repair sometime earlier, and he asked Moses “Cooney” Houston — a Black boy of 14 or 15 — to pick it up. We know that during the party, the gun was under a napkin on a table. And we also know that Houston was telling everyone in earshot that he and Delia were having sex.

"My little wife is mad with me tonight,” Houston said, expressing a sort of ownership over Delia with the wife comment, and hinting that they were intimate in the way married people are. “She does not hear me. She is not saying anything to me.”

Delia objected, saying: “Stop! Coonie. Don’t put your hands on me.”

Turning to Delia, Houston said: "You don't know how I love you."

Houston’s comments didn’t sit right with Delia, who snapped back: "You son of a bitch. You have been going with me for four months. You know I am a lady." Calling somebody a son of a bitch is bad enough now, but it was a very heated curse in 1900. Even in later versions of the song, the singers reference it by saying “tell me ‘bout my mama,” a piece of slang used in lieu of the slur. That she said it should tell you how upset Delia was.

"That is a damn lie,” Houston said. “You know I have had you as many times as I have fingers and toes. You have been calling me husband." Yeah, he just told a room full of people that he had sex with Delia at least 20 times. After she made it clear she’d rather he keep his mouth shut. Total dick move.

Houston was warned about his behavior by their hosts. He promised to behave and Delia went upstairs, probably to get away from him. Later in the evening, when most of the revelers had left, Delia started out the front door, and told Houston they should break up. He grabbed the pistol, and shot Delia in the groin, on her left side. We don’t know if he hit where he was aiming — his attorney said Houston was drunk for the first time in his life that night — but if he did it on purpose, he was literally trying to destroy whatever sexual power she had.

After he shot Delia, Houston fled the scene of the crime. Willie West chased him down, caught him, and handed him over to a police patrolman. Houston confessed to the murder on the spot. At the trial, Officer J. T. Williams, the man who arrested Houston, told the jury that he said he’d done it because she called him a son of a bitch. When questioned, Houston said he’d do it again.

Delia was taken across the street, to her mother’s house, and a doctor was called. She held on for a few hours but died the next day.

This conversation is really the only idea we have about what Delia was like, or what she thought of Houston. She was someone who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind or put a guy in his place. In his research on the Delia ballad, Professor John Garst explores if the West home was a house of prostitution and if Delia was a working girl. His conclusions are unclear.

He notes that Houston and another witness refer to it at the Emma West house, which may imply that she was the madame running a brothel complete with a large front parlor that held an organ for entertainment and a second floor for bedrooms. But he also notes there is no testimony at the trial or news accounts that indicate Delia worked as a prostitute or was involved with other men — which the ballad contradicts completely. I’m going to say this for everyone who needs to hear it: Women are not property, jealousy is not a reasonable motive for murder — and neither is being a sex worker.

So...before we talk about what happened next, there’s another mystery afoot: no one knows who wrote this song. Gordon thinks he tracked it back to a man named Butch Larkin, but with all his research missing, we’ll never know what he uncovered.

The first recorded version was played and sung by Reese Dupree and called “One More Round Gone.” It was captured in 1924 for OKeh Records and set to the melody of “McKinley’s Gone / White House Blues,” a song about the 190 ONE assassination of President McKinley, who, as an abolitionist, wasn’t much liked by whites in the South.

So the rounder in the song — that’s old-time slang for a no-good gambler and lowlife — is the title character Delia runs off with, leaving the man who loves her high and dry. It is sung from the point of view of someone like Houston — a guy who thought he was being mistreated by his girl. The narrator of the song, the good guy, kills that rounder.

Any account of where the song came from before Dupree has been lost. We do know that the first version was collected sometime between 1906 and 1908 and put into print for the first time in 1911 by sociologist Howard W. Odom. His version of the song features wildly different lyrics than Dupree’s, with no music notation to let us know what the melody was.

Robert Winslow Gordon, the founder of the brand new Archive of American Folk Songs at the Library of Congress, set out to uncover the lineage of the song around 1928. He worked with the Savannah police to track down the story and interviewed Delia’s mother. He wrote to his boss that he’d coped 50 pages of court records and discovered 20 versions of the song. Unfortunately, he didn’t publish his findings and the documents were lost. All that is available in his archives is a letter detailing his research.

A North Carolina folklorist, Newman Ivey White, collected and published three versions of “Delia” in 1928. Then a new strain of the song was collected in the Bahamas in 1935 by Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle.

How, exactly, this song traveled the Caribbean Sea to become a piece performed by the Nassau String Band is unknown. But somehow their version of the song is, both lyrically and musically, closest to the version sung by folk singers in America throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In 1952, a record of the song by Blind Blake, who was from the Bahamas, combined aspects of the American and Bahamian versions of “Delia.” It became hugely popular. It’s the template from which Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, Burl Ives, and yes, even Johnny Cash all created versions of Delia.

Now back in 1900, the real Delia was dead and there was no doubt that Houston did it. He was charged with murder and put on trial in Savannah. There was no criminal system for juveniles in Georgia at the time, so Houston was tried as an adult.

Despite admitting to killing Delia, Houston pleaded innocent. To remind the judge and jury that Delia wasn’t the only child in this crime, Houston showed up to the trail wearing short pants instead of trousers — most likely at the suggestion of his lawyer, but when asked by the press, they said it was because his only pair of pants were being cleaned.

Willie and Emma West testified that the shooting was without provocation. The Savannah Morning News reported that the couple called the crime cowardly and brutal. The Wests also confirmed to the jury that they were aware the two children were “more or less” intimate and had been for some months.

In court, Houston said he was wrestling over Willie’s pistol with another boy, Eddie Cohen, and that their roughhousing caused the gun to discharge and kill Delia. Even though he admitted to killing her previously, he changed his story in court. In response, the Wests were called to testify again. They said Cohen wasn’t even in their house when Houston fired. Once the authorities located Cohen, he swore before the solicitor general that he was at the party, but left long before any shots were fired.

When charged to render a verdict, the jury posed a question to the judge. They wanted to know what Houston’s sentence would be if they said he was guilty but recommended extreme mercy. Judge Seabrook, who was presiding over the case, told them that life in prison was the most merciful sentence the law allowed. Ten minutes later, the jury returned; he was guilty, they said, but deserved mercy.

Judge Seabrook made it clear that he didn’t relish sending Houston to jail for life, as the letter of the law required. “I perform this duty with some pain and some reluctance,” he said. “I dislike to condemn one of your youth and apparent intelligence to life imprisonment. In so doing, I exhort you to be a man, even in confinement, to repent of your past evil deeds and strive to earn the confidence and respect of those placed in authority over you.”

The news coverage of the trial said that Houston “thanked Judge Seabrook gaily,” which is...unusual. They also described his walk out of the courtroom as “prancing gaily,” writing: “He was as calm and as debonair as if the experience through which he had just passed was a matter of everyday experience and of no particular importance.” Clearly, the reporter thought Houston’s reaction wasn’t what it should’ve been. Afterward, when asked by a deputy at the sheriff’s office how he liked his punishment, Houston reportedly said, “I don’t like it at all, but I guess I’ll have to stand it.”

Maybe he was in shock at having to contemplate life in prison. Understanding the dire consequences for this bad choice, made while he was drunk, had to be difficult. But, as it turns out, Houston would get a reprieve.

Houston only served 12 and a half years of his sentence when he was granted parole by Georgia Governor John M. Slateon in October 1913. Then, the Prison Commission of Georgia pardoned him in 1917. As an adult, he started going by the name Mose and eventually disappeared, reportedly moving to New York City. By then, there were already multiple Delia and Cooney ballads circling the country. No move could possibly help him escape the songs entirely, though getting out of Georgia probably meant hearing them less often.

As for Delia, she was slandered throughout music history. Painted as an evil woman, a heartless cheat, and a prostitute who Johnny Cash wanted to shoot with his submachine gun. Her memory was marred by countless songs. But that’s how history gets written. The dead don’t talk, and all we ever heard from Delia were a handful of sentences. The people who survived were left to fill in the blanks.

Here’s what we can piece together about her life: Delia was a black girl who lived in Georgia 35 years after the Civil War ended. Her experience in life would’ve largely been segregated. Savannah had an influx of freed people after the Civil War and, along with the new inhabitants came two distinct cultures for whites and blacks.

She would have had limited opportunity for education — a public school for Black students didn’t even exist in Savannah until 1878. Delia’s lack of access to education and her community’s firm observance of color lines meant that as she grew up, she would have had few job options and little reason to leave her neighborhood. And she would have shopped in the Black business district of the city that existed before the Depression.

She also wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the post-Reconstruction South and would have been subject to Jim Crow era regulations and Black Codes. The papers don’t mention who made up the jury at her trial, but back then, Georgia didn’t allow Blacks to serve as jurists.

Despite the fact that she was killed at the age of 14, the Savannah Morning News referred to her as a “woman” when they covered her story in 2020. That poor editorial decision echoes the way many of the Delia song lyrics spoke about her; treating Delia like she was an experienced, grown woman. But she wasn’t. Delia was barely a teenage girl.

Today, Black girls, especially from ages 5 to 14, are perceived as more adult, less innocent, and less in need of protection than white girls, according to a report from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.

The bodies of black women have always been hypersexualized. A pamphlet from the National Organization for Women captures the essence of how Black women are viewed.

“The myth that Black women were vessels for sexual desire was used to justify enslavement, rape, forced reproduction, and other forms of sexual cosersion in the early onset of Western colonization...This same rhetoric continued after the abolishment of American slavery [and] a system of cultural imperialism such as Jim Crow continued to uplift the myth that Black women...were sexual objects and not fully fleshed human beings. Throughout the 20th century, hordes of Black women were sexually abused and assaulted — by men of all races — with the perpetrators of these crimes going largely unpunished.”

For Delia, being a Black girl in the South meant that — while the man who murdered her in cold blood for standing up for herself was convicted — the jury wanted to make sure he was treated with extreme mercy. In folklore, it would mean that her story would become a cautionary tale for women to treat their men with respect or face severe consequences. The song has long reminded us that men are bigger, stronger, and when their egos are offended, they can be deadly.

Delia did get some due respect in 2020. Steve Salter, the president and founder of the nonprofit Killer Blues Inc., has been erecting headstones at the gravesites of forgotten bluesmen buried in unmarked graves around America. After a friend alerted him to Delia’s story, Salter decided to erect a headstone for her in Savannah’s Laurel Grove Cemetery. She has been buried in an unmarked grave since 1901 with no existing record of where exactly her body was. Delia’s headstone went up in March of 2020. It is the 123rd headstone the nonprofit has purchased and the first for a muse to the blues.

There’s no rewriting a hundred years of songs that besmirched Delia’s name and got the story of her death wrong. But that headstone marks a change. Delia is finally seen as more than the subject of men’s desires. She’s the powerful force that inspired a song we’ll never forget.

Thanks for listening to Songs in the Key of Death. There is so much more about the killing of Delia Green to explore in our show notes. We really couldn’t fit it all in the episode! Vital resources used to put this episode together include the Savannah Morning News, both from their archives and more modern coverage of Delia and her grave; Sean Wilentz essay on the song in The Rose & The Briar; Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales that Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folk Songs by Richard Polenberg; and John Garst’s research into the history of Delia, both the song and her life. Our thanks also to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, who provided invaluable information from their archives about Robert Winslow Gordon and Alan Lomax.

Now, with a message from beyond the grave, Sad13 with their version of “Delia.”

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Purchase Sad13's rendition of “Delia” via Bandcamp now, and preorder the rest of the Songs In The Key Of Death EP

Show Notes And Transcript

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