By\u00a0Adam O’Fallon Price<\/p>\n
All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n
On July 1, 1912, Eliza Moorer of Hohenwald, Tennessee, murdered her husband\u00a0following a domestic dispute. According to an article in the Tennessean,<\/em> Moorer was\u00a0apprehended at a local restaurant after drinking several whiskies and describing her crime to the\u00a0incredulous bartender. He was quoted as saying he\u2019d assumed it was drunk bluster, that no one\u00a0could speak with such pleasure and pride of killing their spouse, but he\u2019d sent a local boy for the\u00a0police, just to be sure. In a later interview with the same newspaper, Moorer continued to\u00a0display no remorse. \u201cI guess I got tired of being whipped like a mule,\u201d she said. \u201cMy main\u00a0regret is I can\u2019t shoot him again.\u201d<\/p>\n A decade later, the murder\u2014and Moorer\u2019s own subsequent demise in the hangman\u2019s\u00a0noose\u2014was fashioned into song by Willis McGee, a Memphis bluesman who recorded\u00a0\u201cMulewhipper Blues\u201d as a one-off single for Okeh Records. The song was a surprise hit, re-\u00a0pressed four times before Okeh discontinued the record under pressure from citizens groups as\u00a0far-flung as Oklahoma. Allegedly, the record caused women to murder their husbands. One\u00a0murderess, on trial in Joplin, Missouri, claimed the wicked song had mesmerized her\u2014after\u00a0listening to it for hours, she\u2019d locked her drunken husband in the bedroom and encircled their\u00a0cabin with kerosene. It burned like a witch\u2019s pentacle<\/em>, so wrote a local hack caught in a fit of\u00a0hyperbole, but expressing a common feeling\u2014that this phenomenon was unnatural, an\u00a0abomination. An errant man might hear the tune wafting from a window and scuttle home,\u00a0shutting the door as though against a loosed plague, a fever breeze blowing across the fields like\u00a0Eliza Moorer\u2019s last breath, infecting his wife with strange ideas, infecting him with newfound\u00a0fear when he reached for the bottle or belt.<\/p>\n By\u00a0Adam O’Fallon Price All Rights Reserved. On July 1, 1912, Eliza Moorer of Hohenwald, Tennessee, murdered her husband\u00a0following a domestic dispute. According to an article in the Tennessean, Moorer was\u00a0apprehended at a local restaurant after drinking several whiskies and describing her crime to the\u00a0incredulous bartender. He was quoted as saying he\u2019d assumed it was drunk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":947,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1028","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1032,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1028\/revisions\/1032"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Adam O’Fallon Price has published stories in\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review,\u00a0<\/em>The Iowa Review,\u00a0<\/em>Glimmer Train,\u00a0<\/em>Narrative Magazine, and\u00a0<\/em>The Mid-American Review, among others. His debut novel,\u00a0<\/em>Gravity’s Gone, will be published by Doubleday in 2016.<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"