The disturbing true story behind the Tom Waits song ‘Don’t Go Into That Barn’: “Don’t go inside”
Some tracks present themselves as open books, while others hide their true meaning from the world in an attempt to either remain a mystery or save you from the truth. Deciphering ‘Don’t Go Into That Barn’ from Tom Waits‘ 2004 album Real Gone is no easy task.
Waits has made a career out of being somewhat obscure. Whether it was his appreciation and application of jazz during a period where he largely stood alone in the rock world for doing so, or his unmistakable vocal performances, Waits has relied on obscurity as perhaps his greatest weapon. Never wanting to fall into the mainstream, Waits preferred the banks of leftfield as his sanctuary.
Such a position can allow you a certain vantage point that others cannot hope to gain. Waits’ songs, therefore, are usually wrapped in a different kind of cloth. Waits has written songs about such strange and surreal subjects that providing a narrative, as he does on’Don’t Go Into That Barn’ can feel a little disorientating in itself. But his position also allows him to remind humanity of its darkest moments.
Sung with a manic drawl, its lyrics are hidden behind layers of character and immersed in a swirl of chopped-up beats and melodies. It begs for repeated listens, and as one becomes more familiar with the record, certain details emerge through routes and place names. By the time Waits has reached the final verse, it’s clear we’re being told of a journey into the heart of darkness. “No shirt, no coat / Take me on a flat boat,” he sings before tracing a line all the way to a lonely spot called “Natchez.”
In 2003, Waits came across a story in the New York Times about a “slave jail, or holding pen” that “was encased and largely concealed within the tobacco barn of one Captain Anderson, who used it to house a number of enslaved African Americans”. By 2003, Natchez resembled one of the countless other low-slung and dilapidated tobacco barns along the Ohio River.
However, as well as the eery circumstances, there was one key difference was the “crisscrossed wrought-iron bars” on the windows, which had been ordered by Anderson, a Kentucky slave trader, at the tail-end of the 18th century.
The building was turned into a slavery museum in 2003, but had previously haunted the landscape with an oblique malevolence. “Dad told us never to go in there,” Mr Lang, an 84-year-old farmer who grew up in the area, told the New York Times. “He said, ‘Boys, I’m going to tell you the truth. It’s all right to play around that barn, but don’t go inside.’ He said it just wasn’t right. That it was pitiful. He never did tell us why.”
In his song, Waits draws attention to the routes travelled by slave traders – rivers, oceans and roads. All along these well-worn byways, warehouses for “human cargo” sprang up, allowing traders to buy enslaved people as they sailed upriver. Natchez was one such jail, and by 2003 was one of the few slave jails still standing, a spectral reminder of America’s reliance on the Atlantic slave trade. “It’s nothing but a pile of logs,” Carl B Westmoreland, a senior adviser and curator at the Natchez museum, told the Times. “Yet it is everything.”
Waits traces the dark history of the barn, paying attention to how it continues to haunt its environment. He even details how it was constructed As the slaves approach, one of them describes it as standing “out there like a slave ship upside down,” which is precisely what it was, an upturned slave ship.
Today, visitors can still see the central chain that bound Anderson’s prisoners to one another – one of the many artefacts of the slave trader’s brutality.
