Alan Lomax Archive | Big Charlie Butler: Diamond Joe (1937) @AlanLomaxArchive | Uploaded January 2020 | Updated October 2024, 18 hours ago.
Recorded by John A. Lomax at Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary), March 8, 1937. Little is known about Butler, and much of what is is owed to researcher Stephen Wade, whose book "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" devotes a chapter to Charlie and his "Diamond Joe." Butler was 40 years old at the time of this recording, his first of the song (he'd make two more), and was one year into a ten-year sentence for attempted murder with an axe. (This was his second ten-year bit at Parchman for the same crime.) He had been a resident of Tunica, Mississippi; his escape from the county farm there had landed him again at the state pen. Alan Lomax attempted to contact Butler in 1943 for his permission to issue this recording in what became the Library of Congress' "Afro-American Blues and Game Songs" album, but Lomax's letter was returned unopened with the inscription "gone free left no address." Butler had been pardoned six months earlier.
Butler's intake photo appears in "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
Recorded by John A. Lomax at Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary), March 8, 1937. Little is known about Butler, and much of what is is owed to researcher Stephen Wade, whose book "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" devotes a chapter to Charlie and his "Diamond Joe." Butler was 40 years old at the time of this recording, his first of the song (he'd make two more), and was one year into a ten-year sentence for attempted murder with an axe. (This was his second ten-year bit at Parchman for the same crime.) He had been a resident of Tunica, Mississippi; his escape from the county farm there had landed him again at the state pen. Alan Lomax attempted to contact Butler in 1943 for his permission to issue this recording in what became the Library of Congress' "Afro-American Blues and Game Songs" album, but Lomax's letter was returned unopened with the inscription "gone free left no address." Butler had been pardoned six months earlier.
Butler's intake photo appears in "The Beautiful Music All Around Us" courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Corrections.
