[Narrative] The Legend of Tom Dooley has captivated
the hearts and minds of people for many years.
This was one of America's first
highly publicized crimes of passion
and it goes all the way back to the time
of the American Civil War.
Tom Dooley was locally known as Tom Dula.
However, the spelling or pronunciation of his name
would have no bearing on his fate.
[Explosions]
One of the people who became captivated
with this American tragedy,
was Charlotte Barnes,
so much so, that she was compelled
to spend decades in pursuit of the truth.
[Music]
Carl: Charlotte Corbin Barnes.
author of a great new book, an exciting book.
We're here at Whippoorwill Academy
and this is a place that celebrates
a part of American history.
Why don't you tell, us Charlotte,
how you first discovered this person, Tom Dooley.
Tom Dooley, I was a scrawny little nine-year-old fifth grader
out in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I was bedridden for six months.
I had an abscess tooth
that sent a toxin to my brain
that was the same time that the
Kingston Trio came out with the song,
"Hang Down your Head, Tom Dooley."
♪ Hang down your head and cry ♪
I had to go to bed at sundown every night
while the family watched the new TV
in the living room,
but I would try to stay awake,
because I was so afraid I would die during the nighttime.
I identified with this gentleman
who was going to die tomorrow
and I felt that he just could not have killed
this beautiful young girl.
I didn't even know her name
and I thought at that time
that this was a romance between Grayson and Tom
and this beautiful girl.
Of course, that's not what it was at all,
but that's what I thought back in '58
and so I would sing along with it
and harmonize and cry
and my mother was trying to keep me calm
and she'd say, I can't understand why
you're so upset over someone
who never even existed.
I got better.
My parents divorced
and I graduated from high school,
married Bill, had a daughter, and life went on.
Then we started our own video production business
and we were looking through the newspaper
for projects to document
and this headline leaped out at me
said the local lady is starting a Tom Dooley Museum
in the mountains
and I said, Tom Dooley?
Could this be my Tom Dooley?
And it was.
Tell me, what went through your mind
as soon as you read that?
He was real!
My mother was wrong,
that was the first thing that went through my mind.
We got in touch with Edith
and got some facts over the phone.
And she's the one that built Whippoorwill Academy.
She loves history and the history is so rich around them.
I mean Daniel Boone lived at Beaver Creek
and Tom lived just up the road here
Tom had been a Confederate soldier.
He'd been taken prisoner
and held in a Union prison camp.
It was just amazing.
I was just eating it up.
So Charlotte, looks like we're at the Tom Dooley Museum.
Yes, this is the second,
the expanded version of Tom Dooley Museum.
This was another cabin that was donated.
Now these paintings were significant for you
in the beginning, weren't they?
Charlotte: Yes, he painted 65 depictions of things
that happened during his life
and used those for the school.
The first one she did was Tom here in his uniform.
Is that what you thought he might look like?
Oh yes, yes.
This journey that's brought you from where you were
as a little child in Albuquerque
to where you are now,
it really wasn't about this book was it?
No.
Tell us how that started.
We wanted to do a documentary for public television.
So you and your husband, Bill?
Yes. When I saw that article in the paper,
I said, I found my project.
This is what I want to work on.
I'm finally going to prove that Tom Dooly was innocent.
So that's what got us started.
But I gathered so much information,
there's no way that we could have put that
into a one-hour documentary.
I mean when the book came out it's 500 pages.
It could have been a thousand pages?
You get me talking about Tom
and there's so many little things.
Carl: Well, while we're here,
tell us about a couple of
these other paintings that represent
characters in this story.
Well this is Laura Foster,
the girl who was murdered
and everyone here in the valley
thought she was a wonderful girl.
She was a weaver.
Carl: Who's this other lady?
Charlotte: This is the femme fatale here.
Carl: What did you call her?
Charlotte: The femme fatale.
Carl: explain that.
Charlotte: She was carrying on an affair with Tom
when they were very young,
but I believe her mother was wanting her
to marry a gentleman who could provide her
with the necessities of life.
Carl: Which would not have been Tom.
Charlotte: No, he was a happy-go-lucky musician
and you know how musicians are.
The local legend was that Tom had gone off to war
and so Anne got tired of waiting
and instead married the local cobbler.
Well that wasn't true,
because she married the cobbler
two years before the war started.
Carl: So she was married to the cobbler,
she married him before the war started.
Charlotte: Yes, the marriage did not
interrupt her affair with Tom Dooley.
Carl: So, were Tom and Laura still friends
at that time too?
Charlotte: I don't think that Laura was part of his life
until after the war was over, personally.
Carl: Oh, okay so your thoughts are that
Tom had an affair with the married lady,
he goes off to war,
he comes back and that's when he meets Laura Foster?
Charlotte: I believe so.
Carl: And if that happened and they become companions
and then the other lady should she come calling again?
Charlotte: The other lady was still involved.
She struck up her relationship with Tom
immediately after he came back.
[Narrative] But will we really ever know
who killed Laura Foster?
Charlotte: Another thing Edith told me on the phone
was that Tom had been defended by
the Confederate governor of the state,
and my first question was why would the
governor come to the mountains and defend
this penniless man and a lot of the
people believed that it was because Tom
had served in his unit in the army
and this was the second thing I found out,
that Governor Vance's unit
was the 26th and Tom served in the 42nd.
That was a myth that went out the window.
Both Anne Milton and Tom were arrested and put into jail
and I feel the reason that governor Vance came
was not to defend Tom so much as it was
to defend Anne, because Anne's husband,
this cobbler, James Mountain,
had served in Vance's 26th regiment
and had been wounded twice at Gettysburg.
Those trips that you made up here
how many would you say you made over the years?
Seventy.
Wow.
Because we not only came here,
I would go to the local libraries to their heritage rooms
and the first question I'd ask,
is do you have a Tom Dooley file?
and they go in the Heritage Room
and pull out their Tom Dooley file
and I would make notes
of everything new in that file.
I guess the thing that's so compelling about your story,
Charlotte, is this has been a very long journey, hasn't it?
But wonderful, but wonderful.
Edith turned me loose.
She said, after you get done with this book,
you can write a novel about what your gut
tells you really happened.
So then you've got the facts down now,
you've got the Tom Dooley files,
probably the largest collection that anyone's put together.
We interviewed her mother-in-law
who loved Tom Dooley even more than she did,
if possible.
Oh, he sang and played
and could make that fiddle absolutely cry,
absolutely cry.
He's quite a character, Tom Dooley.
The last one that she introduced us to
and it took a while to get him,
was Morgan Shepherd.
Morgan: Anne Mountain was my great-great grandmother.
And he said I don't care if it's my mother, my sister,
or who it is, I would like to see the truth come out
and I'm so glad that someone is
searching for the truth.
I was interested in the origin of the song
so she made arrangements for us to talk
with Frank Proffitt Jr. who told us that his father
had sung the song to two folk song collectors
from New York City
that had come down to the mountains
to purchase a dulcimer
and this was Frank Proffitt Senior, 1938.
They came down to Pick Britches in the mountains
to collect songs and they said the best player picker
and the songster, was Frank Proffitt.
[Female naartive] It was June 5th, 1938 when we first
reached the house on Beech Mountain.
A crowd of some 25 kinfolk and neighbors
were waiting for us with guitar, homemade banjos,
dulcimers, fiddles, and French harps.
Before long, everybody was making music.
The sound and the people that afternoon
gave us feeling we have never lost.
It was the beginning of our lifelong interest
in traditional music and the people who remember it.
The best singer and guitar player among them,
turned out to be Nathan's son-in-law, Frank Proffitt.
The third song that my father sang was Tom Dooley
and his wife Anne,
Frank Warren's wife, Anne,
took it down and said hang down your head, Tom Dewey,
because he was the governor of New York
and she had him on his mind, I reckon,
but fortunately she corrected it later or it may have never made it to become
popular for the Kingston Trio or nothing.
That's how it was collected.
That version, the family version,
that was the version my great-grandmother
had handed down, Adeline Perdue.
She lived in Wilkes County
and she went to [indiscernible]for him, May 1st 1868.
She said she heard him in there in a jail cell
singing that ballad.
Apparently, he had composed it himself,
because it goes, "I killed little Laurie Foster"
and played it on his old homemade banjo.
Another door Edith opened was the youngest person
that we interviewed, Sam Mass Junior
who was related to Carson Dula
who was Tom Dooley's best friend
and the local moonshine producer
and he was very interesting.
He said that in his later life
he wouldn't talk about Tom much.
One thing for sure
if he followed suit with a lot
of other Dulas in the family,
the Dulas have always had a temper of sorts.
But the one thing that Sam's told us
that really was surprising was that
from his research, he believed that the
girl who was murdered, Laura Foster,
had been a Union sympathizer.
Let me ask you something,
is this ever going to be over?
PAUSE
I don't know. [Laughter]
I don't know what will come next.
I know my husband is in the process of
wanting it to become a movie.
well see about that.
what surprises me is...
[MUSIC]
[♪♪]
♪ Hang your head, Tom Dooley,
oh, hang your head and cry
Killed little Laurie Foster
and now you’re bound to die ♪
Carl: I love our country roads in the Carolinas.