Origin: Traditional (North Carolina, 1800's)
Tom Dooley has been adapted from the traditional tune "Tom Dula."

First recording and first release as by Grayson and Whitter (1929/1930)
Also released by Doc Watson (1964)

This song is based on a historical event, the murder of Laura Foster, allegedly by Thomas C. Dula, who was hanged for the crime in 1868. Many from the NC area believed Dula was innocent.

According to Doc Watson's family history of the incident (collected in the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore): "Doc Watson learned 'Tom Dooley' from his grandmother: 'in the late 1860s, when this story takes place, my great-grandparents were neighbors of Tom Dooley's family, and my grandparents, when they were just children, knew Tom's parents.' Watson said that in the story he is familiar with, 'Tom Dooley was not guilty of the murder of Laura Foster, although he was an accomplice in covering up the crime.'

Instead of a triangle, Watson heard that, 'it was a quadrangle sort of thing. There were two men and two women involved in the whole affair. Mr. Grayson, the sherrif, had courted both Miss Laura Foster and Miss Annie Melton, as had Tom Dooley. Almost everyone around affirmed that Annie Melton had stuck the knife in Miss Laura's ribs...Tom Dooley, however, actually buried the girl, making himself an accomplice.' While Annie Melton was in jail, according to what Watson heard, 'she bragged and told everyone that her neck was too pretty to put a rope around and that they'd never hang her. Of course, they never did.'

Sherrif Grayson, said Watson, eventually married Melton and on her deathbed 'she called her husband in and told him...that she had actually murdered Laura Foster and had let Tom Dooley go to the gallows...' Grayson, upset, left the area. Watson added that Dooley 'was an un thinkably good old-time fiddler, and many people think that the original version, which I learned from my grandmother, has such a lilting, happy-sounding tune because the composer had tried his or her best to get into the song a little of Tom Dooley's personality as a fiddler.'"