What Lies Beneath the Levee Camp Holler
Eric McHenry investigates a century-old crime preserved in music
“Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man,” Eric McHenry writes in our Summer issue. Mattison had found the tale in the writings of folklorist Alan Lomax, whose source identified a powerful Mississippi levee boss as the murderer of an SPCA officer. Not finding any existing ballads about the crime, Mattison wrote the eerily beautiful track “Charlie Idaho,” which caught the attention of McHenry, who specializes in poring over old newspapers for musical breadcrumbs about the blues. He quickly discovered that Mattison wasn’t the first person to put the story to song—and “Charlie Idaho” masked the name of the Mercy Man’s true killer.
Go beyond the episode:
- Read Eric McHenry’s investigation, “Who Killed the Mercy Man?”
- Listen to Mike Mattison’s ballad “Charlie Idaho”
Sampled in the episode:
- Sampson Pittman’s “I’ve Been Down in the Circle Before”
- Ed Lewis’s “Levee Camp Holler” and his commentary, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959 (Courtesy of the Association for Cultural Equity, from the Alan Lomax Collection at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress)
- Alger “Texas” Alexander’s “Levee Camp Moan Blues”
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