The Murder of the Lawson Family: the true events behind folk music’s scariest murder ballad
When the Carolina Buddies entered Columbia Records studio in 1930, they recorded a series of folk songs that were in the strong tradition of the time. But the trio also insisted on recording a new song, one that they had written based on a tragic and terrifying event that had happened just a year before. On Christmas Day, 1929, the small town of Germanton, North Carolina, was rocked by a familicide.
The Lawson family had been a well-known clan in the small town. Headed by patriarch Charlie Lawson, the family were sharecroppers who owned their own farm and had a large family. Although a young son, William, died at the age of six, Charlie and his wife Fannie still had seven additional children, who in 1929 ranged in ages from 19 to newborns.
Days before Christmas, Charlie had taken his family out to buy new clothes and take a family portrait. Whether this was a sign of Charlie’s later murders being premeditated is uncertain. On Christmas Day, Charlie sent two of his daughters, Carrie and Maybell, out to visit their uncle. When the daughters passed the family tobacco barn, Charlie shot them, placing their bodies in the barn.
When Charlie returned to the house, he shot Fannie while she was sitting on the front porch. Charlie then proceeded to kill the rest of his children – first by shooting his daughter Maria, then killing his sons James and Raymond. Finally, Charlie bludgeoned his infant daughter, Mary Lou, to death before wandering out to the woods in what is a beyond traumatising story.
Charlie’s oldest son, Arthur, had been sent into town to run errands that day. Whether Charlie purposefully spared Arthur or simply forgot to account for him was never known. Arthur returned to find his mother and siblings dead, with their arms folded and their heads placed underneath rocks. Charlie was nowhere to be found, but as the police began investigating, a loud shotgun blast was heard from the woods. Charlie’s body was found next to the tree he had been pacing around.
When the Carolina Buddies first recorded ‘The Murder of the Lawson Family’ in 1930, it hadn’t even been a full year since the haunting events had taken place. Not long after the song began to make the rounds, Charlie’s brother Marion took ownership of the house where the murders occurred and turned it into a tourist attraction. The cake that Fannie had made that day was left on display as a kind of gruesome memento.
‘The Murder of the Lawson Family’ wasn’t a hit in the traditional sense, but it did enter the popular folk canon. Bluegrass duo The Stanley Brothers adapted the song into ‘The Story of the Lawson Family’, which was later covered by the likes of Doc Watson and Robbie Fulks in the modern age. No matter who sings it, the song loses none of its terrifying real-life tragedy when it gets played.
Check out the original version of ‘The Murder of the Lawson Family’ down below.
