Who Killed the Mercy Man?

Several years ago, the musician Mike Mattison fixated on the story of how Charlie Idaho killed the Mercy Man. Mattison found it in The Land Where the Blues Began, a celebrated memoir and cultural history by the folklorist Alan Lomax. According to one of Lomax’s sources, Charlie Idaho was a powerful Mississippi levee contractor who once murdered an SPCA humane officer who’d come to inspect Idaho’s mules for abuse or overwork. “He walked Charlie Idaho’s line from end to end. Ain’t been able yet to find a mule with his shoulder well,” said Ed Lewis, a veteran levee camp laborer. “And Mr. Charlie killed the Mercy Man.”

Everything about the story spoke to Mattison, who has a degree in English and American literature from Harvard and now makes his living as a singer-songwriter, most notably for the Tedeschi Trucks Band. He was taken by the name Charlie Idaho, which struck him as both appropriately outsize and bizarrely out of place for a southern levee boss. He was even more fascinated by “the Mercy Man”—the idea that mercy could be embodied in a person, who could then be murdered. “And just realizing there wasn’t a ballad about it,” Mattison told me, “I just couldn’t believe that nobody else had bit on that.”

The result of these musings was “Charlie Idaho,” an eerily beautiful track from Mattison’s 2020 solo album Afterglow. Mattison sings with bitter resignation from the point of view of an eyewitness—“someone who was there, and who continues to be there”:

Every mule’s working when the levee breaks.
If the police don’t get you, it’s the cold and the snakes.
Charlie gonna fix it, whatsoever it takes,
And what are you gonna do?
 
Charlie Idaho shot the Mercy Man,
Shot the Mercy Man,
Shot the Mercy Man.
Charlie Idaho shot the Mercy Man.
At least the poor boy died.

But Mattison, it turns out, isn’t the first musician to sing about the murder, and Idaho wasn’t the first “Mr. Charlie” to be accused of committing it. Lomax encountered at least three versions of the story during his decades of fieldwork, each one fingering a different levee boss for the crime. There’s a hazy, half-legendary quality to all of the accounts, but I’m increasingly convinced that they refer to a single historical event. And although I can’t prove it, I strongly suspect that Mattison’s “Charlie Idaho” is only the most recent contribution to a once-vital but almost completely undocumented lyric tradition.