This week American Pastimes features music from the 1994 Home Grown Music Festival, a set of songs recorded in 1930 by the little-known Floyd County Ramblers, and toe-tapping selections from the classic 1985 vinyl release "Young Fogies, Vol 1." In addition, there are four versions of the true but fabled tale of “Duncan & Brady" aka "Been On the Job Too Long."
Here's the story behind that folk song:
In October 1880 Patrolman James Brady was shot and killed while responding to a barroom brawl at the Charles Starkes Saloon in the red-light district of St. Louis, Missouri. Harry Duncan, a boot-black, porter and actor/singer, was arrested and convicted of the crime. The killing escalated racial tensions within the city and violence erupted. Sentenced to hang, Duncan fought the decision with a series of appeals that took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. His attorney, Walter Moran Farmer presented his case before the Court. It was the first time that an African-American attorney argued a case before the Supreme Court. The appeal was denied and Duncan was executed by hanging in July 1894. Up until the end Duncan continued to claim that saloon owner Starkes was the real killer.
Probably within weeks of the shooting local musicians were singing about the news event and the evolution of a folk tale began. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that initial versions of the song placed the story in the context of ongoing police harassment of African-Americans in a southern city during the Reconstruction Era. But as the song found its way to different communities and musicians it took on new features, specifics, and meaning. With each rendition Duncan’s occupation shifted; from bartender to gambler to grocery owner to lineman. For the most part Brady always remained a police officer (with the “shinin’ star”) and in its most popular widespread versions the song remained a simple matter of good riddance to a corrupt cop. This is evident in the versions collected in the south by Dorothy Scarborough for her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs and those gathered up in Nebraska by Carl Sandburg for his 1927 book American Songbag:
Duncan and his
brother was playin’ pool
When in comes Brady actin’ the fool.
Sandburg’s version ends by asking:
Brady, Brady where
you at?
Struttin’ in hell with his Stetson hat.
The earliest known recording of the story was made in 1929 by Wilmer Watts & the Lonely Eagles. Not much is known about Watts other than he was from the North Carolina Piedmont region. Some of his other songs, such as ‘Cotton Mill Blues’, suggest that he worked the cotton mills. His version of the story is called ‘Been on the Job Too Long’ and it reverses the names and roles: Duncan is the sheriff and Brady a working man; a lineman (possibly a reference to electric or telephone lines, or railroad, but more likely in this context a mill worker). It was Brady who had “been on the job too long” and gets killed by the sheriff. Watts may have been subtly commenting on local labor troubles which were common in the Piedmont during the early 20th century as mill owners used the local police to fight the union organizers.
The policeman though in most versions remains the unsympathetic character. His bad nature is often reinforced by the response of other secondary characters to his death. Music collector Paul Clayton recorded this verse:
Brady, Brady, was a
big fat man;
The doctor caught a hold of Sheriff Brady's hand,
Felt for the pulse and then he said,
I believe to my soul Sheriff Brady is dead.
Been on the job too long.
Even Mrs. Brady’s reaction is presented with ambivalence while at the same time presenting her as a sympathetic character. When told of her husband’s demise in some versions:
She up and started
singing his mourning song.
Runnin’ round town and crying up and down
In an old Mother Hubbard and a blue night-gown
SHE’D been on the job too long.
In yet another version Mrs. Brady takes the news of his death with tepid calmness and remarks to their children, "We’ll all draw a pension when your daddy dies." In that version it’s only the prostitutes who react with real emotion to his demise:
Shufflin' up the
street
In they sweet little shimmies
And they black-stockin' feet.
Been OFF the job too long.
Brady's premature retirement at the hands of Duncan had allowed the working girls to return to their livelihood.
By official accounts Officer Brady wasn’t a bad cop. According to the St. Louis Police Department Memorial he was responding to assist other officers engaged in a shootout that was already taking place in a saloon. But his death in the line of duty found a place in American folklore with hundreds of versions of the tale. As accurate recollections of a historic event the vast majority fail, but as reflections of the human experience and lessons in the social conditions found throughout America in the late 19th and early 20th century they more than succeed.
American Pastimes has featured versions performed by Wilmer Watts & the Lonely Eagles, Leadbelly, the Johnson Mountain Boys, The Roanoke Jug Band, The Possum Trot Orchestra, Martin Simpson, Dave Van Ronk, and Tom Rush.
Sources: John Russell David's Ph.D. dissertation
"Tragedy in Ragtime: Black Folktales from St. Louis" (St. Louis University, 1976);
the Mudcat Cafe folk music website (mudcat.org).