By Adam O’Fallon Price
All Rights Reserved.
On July 1, 1912, Eliza Moorer of Hohenwald, Tennessee, murdered her husband following a domestic dispute. According to an article in the Tennessean, Moorer was apprehended at a local restaurant after drinking several whiskies and describing her crime to the incredulous bartender. He was quoted as saying he’d assumed it was drunk bluster, that no one could speak with such pleasure and pride of killing their spouse, but he’d sent a local boy for the police, just to be sure. In a later interview with the same newspaper, Moorer continued to display no remorse. “I guess I got tired of being whipped like a mule,” she said. “My main regret is I can’t shoot him again.”
A decade later, the murder—and Moorer’s own subsequent demise in the hangman’s noose—was fashioned into song by Willis McGee, a Memphis bluesman who recorded “Mulewhipper Blues” as a one-off single for Okeh Records. The song was a surprise hit, re- pressed four times before Okeh discontinued the record under pressure from citizens groups as far-flung as Oklahoma. Allegedly, the record caused women to murder their husbands. One murderess, on trial in Joplin, Missouri, claimed the wicked song had mesmerized her—after listening to it for hours, she’d locked her drunken husband in the bedroom and encircled their cabin with kerosene. It burned like a witch’s pentacle, so wrote a local hack caught in a fit of hyperbole, but expressing a common feeling—that this phenomenon was unnatural, an abomination. An errant man might hear the tune wafting from a window and scuttle home, shutting the door as though against a loosed plague, a fever breeze blowing across the fields like Eliza Moorer’s last breath, infecting his wife with strange ideas, infecting him with newfound fear when he reached for the bottle or belt.