With spooky lyrics, why not add it to Halloween?
This Tom Waites 2004 song seems to have been based on the 2003 NY Times account of a slave jail in Northern KY, just upriver from Cincinnati. Even now, slowed by a stroke and 70 years past his boyhood toiling in the fields as a tenant farmer, Isaac Lang Jr. can still recall the terrible secrets hidden inside the old tobacco barn. ‘'Dad told us never to go in there,’‘ Mr. Lang, 84, recalled, sitting up in his bed in a nursing home here. ’‘He said, 'Boys, I’m going to tell you the truth. It’s all right to play around that barn, but don’t go inside.’ He said it just wasn’t right. That it was pitiful. He never did tell us why.‘’
****REVISED/REFORMATTED August 25, 2019 - SR****
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