Last month LA musician and writer Andrew Brel sent The Society his thoughts on the background to this horrendous story of mindless racism hatred, lies, callousness and child murder.
His writing sparked memories of Emmett’s story and Bob Dylan’s ballad which rails against Emmett’s death, racism and the authorities. And of course Bobby Gentry.
Andrew’s and The Society’s writing highlighted this awful bigotted tragedy, the lies and the cruelty, the disregard for Emmett and his family.
So, what if he had whistled at you Carolyn?
Why in the minds of the little town of Money in the Mississippi think such a thing should warrant torture, terror, an ultimate death sentence?
Less than a month after we tried to remind people of this almost forgotten story – more a folk tale more than anything else after 60-odd years – then this news began to filter through to our newsdesk:
No one has been convicted of Emmett’s death…
But investigators sifting through records in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse have found an unserved warrant for the arrest of a third suspect — the woman who had accused Emmett of harassing her — for her involvement in his kidnapping.
That woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, is still alive and Emmett’s relatives are demanding that the case be reopened and Ms Donham arrested. ‘Justice has to be served,’ said Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin.
Now in her 80s and living in North Carolina, Ms Donham has not said anything — she hasn’t done for decades.
‘She has been evading justice for over 66 years now,’ said Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker who helped to find the document. ‘The only reason why Carolyn Bryant was never given that warrant was because of the protection of white womanhood.’
A police note on the back of the warrant says she wasn’t arrested because she was not in the county at the time. However, following the killing, a local sheriff told reporters he didn’t want to ‘bother’ the woman since she had two little boys to care for.
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Leigh G Banks writes: The little hamlet of Money is notorious. Yet few have heard of this tiny Mississippi delta settlement.
Way back in the Fifties – when its reputation became forever linked with racism, bigotry and child murder – Money was said to be a ‘fine’ place to live…
...or die because of the colour of your skin.
It was a tin-roof town with a giant cotton gin and a church. And that was about it except for Bryant’s, a grocery store where locals, including the families of black share-croppers, would gather.
Then it all went wrong … a black teenager smiled at a white man’s wife. The teenager was called Emmett Till.
Emmett was a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, and was visiting his uncle Moses Wright.
It was August 1955 and black boys and girls weren’t allowed to flirt. But he tried it with Carolyn Bryant – who owned the store with her husband Roy.
She was supposedly scared. Emmett was tortured, hanged and thrown over the a bridge near the fabled Tallahatchie Bridge.
It was Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, who did it.
Money, Money, Money – it was a white man’s world.
Bob Dylan took up the cudgel and wrote the Ballad of Emmett Till.
He wrote: “And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit thisawful crime
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind
I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free
While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea
If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!”
And then there is the fiction: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe.
Here, LA writer and musician Andrew Brel looks at the background to this horrendous story of mindless hatred, lies, callousness and child murder. Bobbie’s real name is Roberta Streeter.
Andrew writes: 56 years ago today. Poor Billy Joe. Jumped. Tragic. So many lives ruined.
Roberta Streeters story is far more compelling. Raised by Grandparents on a farm after her parents split when she was one. Learned some guitar. Taught herself to write story songs. Moved at a young age to her mother Ruby’s latest marriage in California.
Soon as old enough, 17, in 1960, moved to Los Angeles. Initially a secretary looking to sell her skills as a songwriter. Met a guy with a studio. Recorded her best songs, fast. Accompanying herself.
One of those was a song she wrote after learning about the racist lynching of Emmett Till, the 14 year year old kid gruesomely beaten to death and tossed off a Bridge for looking at a white woman in a whites-only store in a racist town in a racist state in a brutally racist Country. (1955.)
That passionate but subtle reaction, a conscious or even sub conscious musical interpretation of racial injustice shone so brightly through the dinner table narrative, Ode to Billy Joe got her a major record deal.
On the writers demo Roberta, by now Billie, played the distincive repetitive guitar part herself – not in perfect tune and certainly not in constant time.
She never had ambitions to be a professional recording guitar player. (Listen to her glide across some five bpm in the course of the almost five minutes it takes to tell her story.)
Unable to embellish the demo into a release master with a section (like the wrecking crew, whose guitarist she later worked with to great commercial success) due to the irregular timing, the label hired legendary string arranger Jimmie Haskell, whose orchestration of the story is transcendent. Turning a acoustic demo into a work of musical art. Treating it like a film score rather than scraping on the saccharine string parts common for three minute pop tunes of the era. In my view, but for Haskell’s arrangement, you would never have heard of this song, or this artist. That intelligent arrangement was the magic spark that awoke the giant talent of Bobbie Gentry.
What you hear from Roberta in that song is a single take recording of voice and guitar. Simply astonishing capture of the moment in 1967 America – illuminated by that astonishing string arrangement. No wonder it rocked the entire world and lives on to this day as a magical moment of what makes America and music both magnificent.
Roberta Streeter will be 80 next month. Almost certainly still married to the man from Memphis who took her from Vegas when she became an early pioneer of the Block function.
#tallahatchie
#McAllister
#bobbygentry
#BOBDYLAN
#emmetttill
#billiejoe
#bryants
#racism
#klukluxclan
