About: Poor Ellen Smith

An Entity of Type: musical work, from Named Graph: http://dbpedia.org, within Data Space: dbpedia.org:8891

Poor Ellen Smith is a late 19th-century murder ballad recounting the shooting death of one Ellen Smith, and the trial and execution of her murderer. The song is based on real events in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1894, a ne'er-do-well named Peter DeGraff had a love affair with Ellen Smith, who may have been mentally challenged and was unable to understand his rejection of her. Smith became pregnant by DeGraff, but their child died at birth. Afterwards she began following DeGraff around town, and eventually he sent her a note that asked her to meet him in a secluded area, worded in such a way that Smith would have believed DeGraff wanted to reconcile. Instead, when she arrived, DeGraff shot her through the chest. He later reported that Smith's only words after being shot were "Lord ha

Property Value
dbo:abstract
  • Poor Ellen Smith is a late 19th-century murder ballad recounting the shooting death of one Ellen Smith, and the trial and execution of her murderer. The song is based on real events in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1894, a ne'er-do-well named Peter DeGraff had a love affair with Ellen Smith, who may have been mentally challenged and was unable to understand his rejection of her. Smith became pregnant by DeGraff, but their child died at birth. Afterwards she began following DeGraff around town, and eventually he sent her a note that asked her to meet him in a secluded area, worded in such a way that Smith would have believed DeGraff wanted to reconcile. Instead, when she arrived, DeGraff shot her through the chest. He later reported that Smith's only words after being shot were "Lord have mercy on me." DeGraff confessed to the crime on the gallows, shortly before he was hanged. The song and its variants have been performed and recorded by a range of artists including Tommy Jarrell, Neko Case, Laura Cantrell, Molly O'Day, Kristin Hersh, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper, Jimmy Martin, the Stanley Brothers, Ralph Stanley & Larry Sparks, the Kossoy Sisters, Billy Strings, The Country Gentlemen, John Hartford, The Kingston Trio, Crooked Still, Robert Earl Keen, Wussy, , and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. The plot was also adapted by German Folk-Metal band Subway to Sally in their song "Arme Ellen Schmitt". (en)
dbo:wikiPageID
  • 21322084 (xsd:integer)
dbo:wikiPageLength
  • 1965 (xsd:nonNegativeInteger)
dbo:wikiPageRevisionID
  • 1085564828 (xsd:integer)
dbo:wikiPageWikiLink
dbp:wikiPageUsesTemplate
dcterms:subject
gold:hypernym
rdf:type
rdfs:comment
  • Poor Ellen Smith is a late 19th-century murder ballad recounting the shooting death of one Ellen Smith, and the trial and execution of her murderer. The song is based on real events in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1894, a ne'er-do-well named Peter DeGraff had a love affair with Ellen Smith, who may have been mentally challenged and was unable to understand his rejection of her. Smith became pregnant by DeGraff, but their child died at birth. Afterwards she began following DeGraff around town, and eventually he sent her a note that asked her to meet him in a secluded area, worded in such a way that Smith would have believed DeGraff wanted to reconcile. Instead, when she arrived, DeGraff shot her through the chest. He later reported that Smith's only words after being shot were "Lord ha (en)
rdfs:label
  • Poor Ellen Smith (en)
owl:sameAs
prov:wasDerivedFrom
foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf
is dbo:wikiPageDisambiguates of
is dbo:wikiPageWikiLink of
is dbp:title of
is foaf:primaryTopic of
Powered by OpenLink Virtuoso    This material is Open Knowledge     W3C Semantic Web Technology     This material is Open Knowledge    Valid XHTML + RDFa
This content was extracted from Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License