Dead man's guitar (Murder ballads and dark turns: More songs about Stack A Lee and Delia)

The Memphis newspaper for that day of ’53 said an itinerant musician returned home from the road to catch and shoot and kill his wife and her lover, himself an itinerant musician named Malcolm Gaunt, aged thirty-eight, hometown unknown.
It was reported that Frankie Walls shot them dead and then walked out on the porch to await the law. He played the dead man’s guitar while he waited. He played some country weepers and then he played a bluegrass tune so fast his fingers took to flying. He was playing a mean Memphis blues called “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” when the police arrived. His playing was full now of mad flourishes and thudding depths and rippling asides. The lead officer, who played a little, once upon another lifetime, let Frankie finish the song, and then took custody of the guitar.

“A Cassandra Special Rider,” the officer said, nodding approval.

“Yeah,” said Frankie in his smoky, low voice. “With a woman like that I don’t know what he needed with mine.”

-- from "The Long Gone Daddies"

Hawlin Alley on a dark and drizzly night,
Billy Lyons and Stack-A-Lee had one terrible fight.
All about that John B. Stetson hat

-- Bob Dylan's version of "Stack A Lee"

... the song says that a man's hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it's a matter of taste. they say "let's sleep on it" but theyre already living in the sanitarium. No Rights Without Duty is the name of the game & fame is a trick. playing for time is only horsing around. Stack's in a cell, no wall phone. he is not some egotistical degraded existentialist dionysian idiot, neither does he represent any alternative lifestyle scam (give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist & you'll see the Authentic alternative lifestyle, the Agrarian one) Billy didn't have an insurance plan, didn't get airsick yet his ghost is more real & genuine than all the dead souls on the boob tube -- a monumental epic of blunder & misunderstanding. a romance tale without the cupidity.

-- Bob Dylan on "Stack A Lee," from the liner notes to "World Gone Wrong"

They buried little Delia in the churchyard deep
Louis Collins at her head, Stackalee at her feet
The angels laid them away

-- Josh Ritter, "Folk Bloodbath"

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "Love Henry" and "Stack A Lee," Bob Dylan
3. "Frankie and Johnnie," Jimmie Rodgers
4. "Folk Bloodbath," Josh Ritter
5. "Louis Collins," Mississippi John Hurt
6. "Delia's Gone," Johnny Cash
7. "God Rode Through Clarksdale," Rob Jungklas
8. "A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun," Tom Waits
9. "Stack Shot Billy," Black Keys
10. "Devil Got My Woman," Skip James
11. "I Want Love and Affection (Not the House of Corrections)," Nathan Mayer
12-13. "Dark Turn of Mind" and "The Way the Whole Thing Ends," Gillian Welch