The Tale of Tom Dooley (cont.)

At least three ballads sprang up about the murder and hanging. Captain Thomas Land, a resident of Happy Valley, wrote a long ballad soon after the murder. Often, he is cited as the man who penned "Tom Dooley." However, the verses in Land's ballad bear no resemblance to the folk song we know today. The version with the famous refrain, "Hang down your head, Tom Dooley," was just another folk tune, its origin unknown. The earliest attribution came some 60 years after the murder, when a descendant of Col. James Grayson, a legally blind but moderately successful fiddler and singer named Gilliam Banmon Grayson went to Memphis with Henry Whittier to record a rendition of The Ballad of Tom Dooley for The Victor Talking Machine Company on October 1, 1929. It might have become a hit, but the Depression was starting and it only sold a couple of thousand copies.

But this recording helped keep the song alive among later generations of folksong collectors. In August 1957, a new young singing group called The Kingston Trio heard the song at the Purple Onion club in San Francisco. They recorded it in February 1958 for their debut album, and when several disc jockeys picked up on the song, Capitol Records released it as a single in August, 1958. No one could have foreseen the results: It shot to No. 1 on the Billboard chart by late November, sold a million copies by Christmas, and was awarded a gold record on January 21, 1959. In 1959 it gained the group a Grammy for Best Country and Western Vocal Performance and helped keep The Kingston Trio album on the charts into 1961. It also inspired the 1959 film The Legend of Tom Dooley, but that film tells a completely different and unrecognizable story.

The Kingston Trio's phenomenal popularity helped to alter the direction of popular music in the U.S. Between 1958 and 1964's British invasion, folk songs and original songs presented as folk songs experienced unprecedented success, making acoustic folk music commercially viable. The song Tom Dooley went on to sell six million copies and was recently named one of National Public Radio's Top 100 Songs of the 20th Century.

In 1958, with the renewed national attention "Tom Dooley" was receiving due to the Kingston Trio's recording, the grave of Tom Dula was located in Wilkes County near Tom's home. It was nearly invisible, overgrown with vines and weeds. An article appeared in the December 3, 1958, issue of the Statesville Record and Landmark describing the efforts of the North Iredell Post of the American Legion to honor the dead Civil War veteran by restoring his grave with a monument, or by moving Dula's grave to a more prominent site.

Almost immediately, Andy Barker, a "dreamer, promoter, and super-salesman," offered Love Valley as a site for a new resting place for Tom Dula's remains. Love Valley was a western-looking cowboy town Barker had built just north of Statesville four years earlier. It was a resort town built on the myth of frontier virtue and Christian values that, to Barker, had faded into the past— values of family, love, and peace. Barker likened himself to P. T. Barnum, and staged some impressive promotions during the early years to pique curiosity and interest in his Love Valley development.

Response from Wilkes County was swift. Prompted by the public discovery of the poor condition of a local hero's grave, Wilkes citizens restored the grave site as an honor due a hero, and expressed strong sentiment against moving it. An Iredell County delegation traveled to Wilkes County and met with the owner of the land where Dula's grave was located, who unequivocally stated that the grave could be restored but could not be moved, and the issue was decided.

It says something about the power of myth and legend that Tom Dula was (and still is) regarded as a heroic figure. An immoral young man who contributed little to a losing war effort, he either committed the very definition of premeditated murder or played a major part in its cover-up. He then engaged in "flight to avoid arrest" and, after his capture, apparently never showed remorse. Even the famous ballad handed down through the generations is the story of a guilty man. Yet, local public sentiment has come to view him with some sympathy, almost as an innocent man wronged, guilty only of being "one that lov'd not wisely but too well." Ann Melton, meanwhile, has become reviled as either a temptress who coerced Tom into doing wrong, or as a cold-blooded murderess.

One can only speculate about how each of them would be regarded if the outcome had been different. If Ann Melton had been hanged as his accomplice, would they both have become "romantic outlaws," as happened with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow? Or, if Ann had been executed while Tom Dula went free, would he be the villain who "got away with it"— or the hero wrongly accused?

In 2001, some North Wilkesboro townspeople who felt Tom Dula was unjustly convicted sought a posthumous pardon, saying Dula would not be convicted today based on evidence presented at his trial. The effort was led by the local weekly newspaper The Record. Ken Welborn, publisher of The Record, hired a local law firm to prepare a formal petition asking North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley for the pardon. The pardon request was based on a review of more than 250 pages of documents which raised several points: no murder weapon was found, there were no eyewitnesses, there was an abundance of conflicting and hearsay evidence, and the testimony of some key witnesses was unreliable.

In January of 2009, at the end of his term in office, Governor Easley denied the request to pardon Tom Dula. Barry Jenkins, the Governor's Clemency Administrator, stated, "He (the Governor) never gives any reason why he grants or denies a pardon. He gave no pardons when he was leaving office." Moreover, a pardon would not erase all the tarnish from Dooley's name. "A pardon forgives a person for a crime," Jenkins said. "Only a court can expunge someone of a crime."

Even without a pardon, at least his case has been brought before the court of public opinion.