The Legend of Tom Dula

A little over 130 years ago in a small rural North Carolina town in Wilkes County, a young girl of meager means left home to meet her fiancé in the woods. She had hidden her special dress under her house clothes and had packed her belongings in a trundle bag, ready for her new life. She sat in the woods and waited for her beloved, and someone met her there--someone who hated her enough to kill her and drag her to a small grave that the person had dug the evening before. A few months later, her fiancé was captured and tried for the crime. After one appeal, he was condemned for her murder and hanged.

The story of Tom Dula and his unfortunate fiancée Laura Foster made the headlines in 1866, from as far away as New York. The Civil War had ended and the Reconstruction of the South had begun, but not without bitter feelings on both sides. So a murder of a poor, uneducated girl by an equally poor boy sparked a legend in the South and a headline story in the North. Some time after Tom Dula was executed, someone wrote a ballad, put it to music, and the legend of Tom Dula was born.

The song and the story of Tom Dula were passed down through so many people over the years that truth was lost. From romantics to folk singers, hundreds of people have surmised what happened on May 25, 1866. But no one is alive to tell the real story. The tale became a folk legend in the South, and the song passed from one generation to the other, each person proud to be part of the tradition of the Tom Dula story. Then one evening, after the Kingston Trio sang their new song, "The Ballad of Tom Dooley," Tom Dula's story was nationally immortalized.

The Legend of Tom Dula shares the history of the song and some ideas about the story from some people who can trace their roots back to the Happy Valley clan and others who have spent their lives fascinated with this obscure murder. Besides sharing some of the hearsay from the testimony and some opinions about who really committed the deed, the program sheds light on Frank Proffitt's involvement in the song, how the Kingston Trio discovered it, and how Frank finally received credit for the Kingston Trio's version of the song.