SOURCE: Baker, Bruce E. “North Carolina Lynching Ballads.” In Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, pp. 219-45. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Baker examines ballads associated with three lynchings in North Carolina and contends that, more than novels and poetry, folk music offers insight into attitudes toward lynching in the communities where they occurred.

If, as if often claimed, lynchings have had profound effects on the communities in which they happened, those effects should be evident in the cultural productions of those communities. Although scholarship has begun to look at cultural productions concerning lynching, this attention to date has focused on “high culture” such as novels and poetry. These productions are rich, but they typically reflect sensibilities that may be distinct from those of communities in which lynchings occurred. To study cultural productions directly shaped...