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THEFT OF STETSON HAT CAUSES DEADLY DISPUTE, VICTIM IDENTIFIES SELF AS FAMILY MAN ~ Liner note for Frank Hutchinson’s Stackalee from The Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith
It’s 1895, Christmas night. You’re wandering confused down a street you’ve never seen before, but somehow you know the day, the year.
The city. You’re in St. Louis.
How? Are you dreaming? Maybe you are, because you keep on sighting images and scenes that make no sense, that shouldn’t be in this world. You see a man by an open grave pulling the rings from a dead woman’s fingers. A heavyset speaker on a podium is declaiming his views on tariff laws when an assassin dashes up and shoots him in the belly.
There’s a track parallel to the street, and a freight train suddenly appears, moving much too fast, the half-seen engineer pulling down the whistle cord in a long, piercing scream. It disappears back into the night. A few seconds later the street is shrouded in fog, and you glimpse what looks like the prow of an enormous ship passing by, even though there isn’t any body of water that could float it within a thousand miles. The fog conceals the ship again before you can see any more than the last few letters of its name -”ANTIC.”
