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When we talk about the sexism of murder ballads, “Omie Wise” jumps to the forefront as one of the most prominent examples. Whether the true story involves a woman who was drowned because she became inconvenient or because she stood up to a no-good man, they both end the same way — with Naomi Wise dead, and many tales that got it wrong.
• “A true account of Nayomy Wise,” a longform poem by Mary Woodey
• “The Murder of ‘Omie Wise,’ 1808” by Harold Schlecter in the Yale Review
• “Little Omie: America's oldest murder ballad about a romance that for whatever reason just didn't work out” on American Pasttimes
• “Listen to My Story: ‘Ballad of Omie Wise’” in the Greensboro News and Record, 2010
• Life of Naomi Wise : true story of a beautiful girl, enacted in Randolph County, N. C., about the year 1800 by Braxton Craven, 1874
• “The Historical Events Behind the Celebrated Ballad ‘Naomi Wise’” by Robert Roote in the North Carolina Folklore Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1984
• “The Story of Naomi Wise and the History of Randleman” compiled by the Randleman Rotary Club, 1944
• Naomi Wise: Creation, Re-Creation, and Continuity in an American Ballad by Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus (Chapel Hill Press, 2003)
• Dead and Gone: Classic Crimes of North Carolina by Manly Wade Wellman (University of North Carolina Press, 1980)
• “Old Songs: Omie Wise” by Bob Waltz, originally published in Inside Bluegrass, August 2000
• Bob Dylan at the Riverside Church Hootenany in 1961
You know, there’s a reason murder ballads sound sexist to modern ears. It seems like an awful lot of them are about killing women. It’s a whole subgenre with dead girls everywhere. True crime writer Harold Schechter explains in the Yale Review that the songs known as Murdered Girl Ballads are “tear-jerking tunes about trusting young women impregnated and slain by heartless seducers.”
The murders committed in these songs are carried out against a soft, helpless, innocent creature who is beloved and gentle and youthful and beautiful — and that’s a part of the problem. Let’s pause for a quick reminder that women don’t need to be beautiful, innocent and helpless to deserve empathy. We’re all humans. That said, the sense of injustice these songs inspire, the “dark versus light” dichotomy, is a part of why they endure.
You know, it is striking to look back on the inequality women were treated with until pretty recently. And it’s wild that murdering women is STILL the one sort of crime people fixate on. Experts will tell you that it’s normal to be interested in true crime — up to a point. There are lots of reasons it’s appealing, especially to women. The evil behavior itself is as fascinating as trying to figure out why someone does it. Learning about these stories prepares us to protect ourselves, should some killer land at your front door. Plus, it lets you feel lucky — because you’re not the victim.
So it’s no surprise that murdered women and girls are the focus of many true crime stories. They’re at the center of the documentaries we binge. They drive clicks on the internet as we try to solve a who dun it. They inspire unforgettable ballads that get handed down through generations. And they’re the subject of an endless number of podcasts...including this one. I mean, that is why you’re here, right?
There’s a singular take on “Omie Wise,” and you can find it on an obscure bootleg by Bob Dylan. He performed the song twice in 1961 and never again — that anyone has caught on tape, anyway. Dylan’s first pass at it was recorded in July at the Riverside Church Hootenanny Special, before he was signed to a label. He was still a fresh face in the Village circuit.
It was broadcast on WRVR in New York City, from a stage that would later be the setting for speeches by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the station’s 1963 Peabody-award winning coverage of the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. When Dylan played, it was a brand new station that had only been broadcasting for seven months. Dylan himself was a mere 20 years old. A transcript of his introduction gives us a look at the man, before he became America’s preeminent folk singer and songwriter.
“We're going to go back to our regular folk program and bring you now a fellow who's been around the New York area for about a year,” the announcer says. “He also performs in various coffeehouses. He plays the harmonica, he sings a lot of songs by Woody Guthrie, sings a lot of his own material. He comes from Gallup, New Mexico — Bobby Dylan.”
BOBBY Dylan, can you imagine?!? Anyway, his version of “Omie Wise” is different from the standard, thanks to revised lyrics. The elements of the story are all there, but changed up a bit to Dylan’s liking with some of the tale distorted, making it a version unique to him.
Dylan knows a lot about ballads and folk music and what he did with “Omie Wise” is something people have been doing to that song and her story for generations: adding to it and putting their own twist on what happened to Omie. By the time Dylan did it, it was already tradition.
“Omie Wise” is a story we’ve been singing, told through a dark and gruesome murdered girl ballad for generations. But her story isn’t easy to tell — not if you’re a fan of facts, anyway. I’m Courtney E. Smith and you’re listening to Songs in the Key of Death. This is the story of Omie Wise, the mysterious woman in the water.
There are a few things we know about Omie’s murder for certain, thanks to the archival work of Robert Roote in a 1984 piece in the North Carolina Folklore Journal. We also know the stories that floated around the county after Omie’s death, because they were documented in the lyrics of a murder ballad and one strange poem — but we’ll come back to that shortly. Let’s start with the facts.
In March 1807, Jonathan Lewis was indicted by a grand jury for the murder of (quote) “a Certain Omia Wise” in Randolph County, North Carolina. He PLED not guilty. He was detained without bail, and a trial was planned for October — witnesses were already being subpoenaed on the day he was arrested. Jonathan was eventually transferred to the Guilford County jail, where his trial would be held. Not ten days after the transfer, the county magistrates contacted the commander of a local militia. The sheriff suspected Jonathan would try to escape, and they needed help. The commander sent five men to guard him and the militia was tasked with staying there until the day after Jonathan’s trial.
Turns out they were onto something. Just a few days after the militiamen showed up, Jonathan escaped. Roote’s research indicates that his murder trial might not have happened at all — records that would confirm it are thought to be lost in a fire — and the evidence of what went down during his escape is “sketchy,” (yeah they were saying sketchy in the 1800s). The records show he was captured and jailed again for the offense of escaping. So...did the county just decide to let the murder slide? It doesn’t totally make sense, given that we know they pursued him for the jailbreak. Unfortunately, any confirmation that he was also punished for murder seems to have vanished.
Most of what we think we know about Omie comes from legend. We’ll start with the song, which tells a tale of sex, deceit, and drowning. It begins with Omie at Adams’ Spring, the homestead of William Adams, where she worked. It speaks of a man named John, sometimes called Lewis, convincing Omie to elope. But John doesn’t want to marry Omie — it’s a trick. She gets on the back of his horse, and he takes her to the river. When they arrive, he tells her he’s going to drown her. It’s depraved and cruel! Omie begs for her life. Like a true creep, John gives her a hug and a kiss, then pushes her into the water where he leaves her for dead. Her body is found later by two boys who were out fishing. In the song, her death is a warning for other women to be wary of who they ride off on horseback with and to protect their virtue.
The John character in the song is such a bad man that the whole town knows he killed her as soon as it happens. He is arrested, and none of his friends bail him out. Yikes. But the blame is still on Omie in the song, because she “allowed” her reputation to be sullied and became unmarriable. There’s no bigger sin a woman can commit. Tragedy was bound to befall her.
When a longform poem called “A true account of Nayomy Wise” was discovered at UCLA in the mid 1980s — from a bulk donation of books made in 1952 — we got a look into the gossip about Omie from her hometown.
The poem was apparently written by Mary Woody, a girl who lived in the area and was born in 1801 — so she would have grown up hearing this story. It’s a handwritten account of idle talk about Omie and her courtship with Jonathan. In this version, Ome was the mother of two bastard children by different men and a bit older than her beau.
The poem says Omie performed hard labor to earn money to care for her children. It also says Omie was pregnant again, for the third time. The baby was Jonathan’s, who the writer paints as egotistical and “too fond of carnality.” That’s a pretty solid 19th century burn, eh?
Mary’s sharp tongue hits Omie too though, painting her as an inappropriate match for a high ranking man like Jonathan, to whom was happy to attach herself. The actual Jonathan Lewis had a family best described as colorful. His father and uncle became locally infamous when, uh, one shot the other for taking in his wife when she ran away after getting a brutal beating from her husband. Clearly these people are well-balanced and normal so — let’s keep moving.
To all appearances, Jonathan was more stable than the men in his life. He worked at a cushy job in a dry goods shop where, rumor has it, his mother urged him to marry the shop owner’s daughter, who had a hefty dowry and higher position in society. Omie messed that up. She told everyone that Jonathan stopped to see her when he rode between his family’s home and his job each week. Jonathan’s other girl didn’t appreciate that. The poem says that Omie brought disgrace to his name by not keeping the baby a secret, as he asked her to.
It describes how an angry Jonathan planned to convince Omie that he would take her to the preacher to be married — and killed her instead. One eye-grabbing thing in the poem is that Omie didn’t seem to be afraid of him. She stands up to him. I guess that’s what happens if a woman finally writes the story — thanks Mary Woody! Mary also calls his actions vile and base, condemning Omie’s murder.
Once again, when Omie’s body was found in the poem, the local population was so angered, and so immediately suspicious of Jonathan, that his guilt was a foregone conclusion. That lines up with the official record showing that subpoenas were sent out the day he was arrested.
Then Omie’s story gets another retelling in Naomi Wise: The Wrongs of a Beautiful Girl, a novel published in the mid-1800s by Charles Vernon. Oh, and he wasn’t a real person. It was the pen name of a very established man: Braxton Craven, who would become the second president of what became Duke University, and later the president of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Craven was born in Randolph County, North Carolina in 1822 — the same place where Omie was killed.
Like Mary Woody, he probably grew up hearing her story and song. His fictionalized account took Omie’s life in a colorful and different direction, one where she was a young, naïve maiden of extraordinary beauty and Jonathan was a nefarious murderer — it was very much in the style of the Romantics. And we certainly know women can’t be sympathized with unless someone finds them fuckable! Thanks for the reminder, Braxton!
In his novel, he writes Omie as an orphan who lived in a rural village, describing her as (quote) “the gentle, confiding, unprotected creature that a man like [John] would love by instinct....[Naomi’s] love for [John] was pure and ardent...” In this telling, John was engaged to his boss’ daughter, Hettie Elliott. But this John also proposed to Naomi. Eventually, rumors that Naomi was pregnant reached Hettie, and John denied them.
Things reached a boiling point after Naomi threatened to sue John over the engagement. That’s when he decided to kill her. The details about the horseback ride and the drowning stay the same. Hearing this story again, I’m struck by how monsterous of a reaction that is. Don’t like how the woman in your life is handling things? Drown her!
In Craven’s account an elderly woman, Mrs. Davis, sent her sons to check things out when she heard a suspicious noise at the river. The boys didn’t want to go, and their delay meant they arrived just as a mysterious figure on horseback rode away. A search party went looking for Omie the next day, tracking her movements. As in all the stories, she was found in the water. The coroner ruled her death “drowning by violence.”
The tradition of reimagining the life of Omie Wise continues in The Rose & the Briar, a 2005 essay collection. Songwriter Anna Domino added her spin to Omie’s story, penning a letter in the voice of this mysterious woman. Domino’s retelling doesn’t shirk away from Omie’s past, but paints a picture of how she might have hidden her two bastard children in plain sight. It tells the story of a mother who is a member of the working poor and how hard that life is. It’s heartbreaking, laying out Omie’s loving vision of her new beau John, who is her savior. Her romantic idea of him coming to take her away from a rough life, to finally be married after so many disappointments, makes your heart drop. Because you know it ends badly.
The story of Omie Wise we know best though, is the one detailed in the song’s lyrics, which have evolved and changed as different performers played it. The original lyrics tell a specific story, with names, locations, and Jonathan’s intentions all laid bare. All those details make it seem true. Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus set out to find the origins of the song, taking up the research of her late husband. She thought the songwriter must have known Jonathan, to know so many details of his plan, and that it must have been written soon after Omie’s murder.
“Omie Wise” is only one of MANY murdered girl ballads. There’s also the 400 year old English song “The Wexford Girl,” which got a second life in the 1950s as “The Knoxville Girl” thanks to the Louvin Brothers. Then you have “Poor Ellen Smith,” “Pretty Polly,” “The Lily of the West,” “Little Sadie,” and on and on and on. The only thing longer than the list of murdered girl ballads is the list of people who performed them.
Now the song collectors and archivists who researched “Omie Wise” could also tell you all about how the song connects to countless European murdered girl ballads with tales of promiscuous women being washed clean by water as they drown. You know, it’s the idea that, when women are free — be that sexually, intellectually, or financially — they’re dangerous. That reinforces the old adage that the rules aren’t the same for women. And that punishment for breaking the rules is deadly.
“Omie Wise” is one of the oldest in the American murder ballad tradition that continues to thrive, being covered in modern times by Elvis Costello with Anna and Kate McGarrigle, Okkervil River, The National’s Bryce Dessner alongside eighth blackbird — plus, of course, Bob Dylan’s live version, Shirley Collins, and the definitive recording by North Carolina’s own Doc Watson.
The original recording of it popped up on a slick country record by an opera singer turned studio rat using the name Vernon Dalhart in 1925. Just a year earlier, Dalhart recorded “The Wreck Of The Old 97,” which became the first million selling record in country music history. Thanks to that hit, his version of “Omie Wise” was heard far and wide on AM radio frequencies across America.
But there’s another old time version from the era that feels much more authentic, even if no one released it for another quarter century. GB Grayson recorded it in the mid-20s, but his take didn’t come out until 1952’s Anthology of American Folk music, collected by Harry Smith.
Grayson was a blind fiddle player from Tennessee who teamed up with guitarist Henry Whittier to record traditional songs and write some originals. He carried his version of “Omie Wise” around the countryside — like a wandering musician in the tradition of a Shakespearian minstrel. And that’s exactly what Grayson was: a fiddle player who roamed from town to town, busking for cash. How he sang it is how people in Appalachia would have known it. His work with Whittier is what inspired record companies to find guys like Dalhart to do more polished versions of these ballads.
As for “Omie Wise,” her real story isn’t one of a proper lady. Or a beautiful, helpless creature. It’s more complex than a song about how one romance went bad. We remember her, thanks to the song that has survived her, as a woman who was deceived and drowned in the river. We remember the myth of her, and we should remember her as the woman who stood up to a lying man, demanding a better life for herself and her baby. If there is any moral to be had in the story of Omie Wise, it’s that we can keep rewriting her story and choose to mythologize her not as a victim but as a woman who was sick of this shit, and wasn’t gonna take it anymore.
Thanks for tuning in to Songs in the Key of Death. For more information on Omie Wise, check our show notes. Particularly helpful texts in developing this episode included Mary Woodey’s poem, “A True Account of Nayomy Wise;” Robert Roote’s account of the life of Naomi Wise in the North Carolina Folklore Journal; and Eleanor R. Long-Wilgus’s book on Naomi Wise.
Now, from deep underwater, here is Sad13 and their modern retelling of “Omie Wise.”
