Devastating Dirtiest version of this song on youtube Chills. Every damn time. The events of “Omie Wise” can be pinned down to a known historical event—the drowning of Naomi Wise in Randolph County, North Carolina in 1808. Jonathan Lewis was known to be involved with Naomi, who was an orphan living with the family of William and Mary Adams. Naomi was possibly already a mother of two children out of wedlock before meeting Lewis. In the song, she is pregnant with another child, likely his. Lewis was arrested for the crime, but escaped jail. He was captured again years later, tried and convicted for breaking jail, but never convicted for her murder. Harry Smith included a 1927 version of “Omie Wise,” or “Ommie Wise,” performed by G.B. Grayson in his mid-20th century Anthology of American Folk Music. Grayson, incidentally, was the grand nephew of another (James?) Grayson, involved in the arrest of one Tom Dula (pron. “Dooley”) in the 1860s, but that’s another ballad (“Annotations of Jeff Place,“ in the liner notes to the re-issue of the Anthology.) I’ll post Grayson’s version of “Ommie Wise” a little later this week, along with an interesting companion piece speculating on Lewis’s fate. mbmonday.blogspot/2012/01/omie-wise.html
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 03:56:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015