From the creation myth of “Stairway to Heaven” to the urban legend about “In the Air Tonight,” popular music is forever suffused with lore—and perhaps no genre reverberates with it as much as the blues. For The American Scholar, Eric McHenry investigates the apocryphal character of “the Mercy Man.” The twist? He’s real. The bigger twist? His very name peels back a lid on one of this nation’s most indelible stains.
It’s not surprising that as the details of the murder receded in memory, the story attached itself to different men. The most notorious levee contractors and foremen were easy enough to conflate. Socially and professionally, they were a cabal; newspaper searches for Charles Siler, Forrest Jones, Charles Aderholdt, Charles Lowrance, George Miller, and their ilk show them working for one another’s companies, marrying one another’s cousins, and carrying one another’s caskets. It didn’t hurt that an uncanny number of them were named Charles. In Black story and song since antebellum times, “Mr. Charlie” had been a generic name for a white “bossman.” “All the way from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia,” Lomax writes, “I had heard black muleskinners chant their complaint against Mister Charley, but the score of singers all disagreed about his identity.” Who killed the Mercy Man? If levee bosses were just a bunch of interchangeable Mr. Charlies, then they all did.
More picks from The American Scholar
Thinking in the Margins
“What Oliver Sacks jotted down in the books he read.”
Acid Blues (Slight Return)
“The music of Jimi Hendrix continues to strike a chord.”
The Last Good Thing
“DVDs, streaming, and the price of nostalgia.”
Second and Long
“Why did James Whitehead—poet, fiction writer, and onetime college football player—fail to complete a successor to his celebrated first novel?”
Blood-Blue Sky
“How horseshoe crabs and ecological grief connect with the wonders of the human heart.”
Puzzled
“In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure.”
