Poor Ellen Smith

Poor Ellen Smith (Roud 448) is an American murder ballad drawn from a real crime. On July 20, 1892, Ellen Smith — a young woman who worked at the Zinzendorf Hotel in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — was shot through the heart by her former lover, Peter DeGraff. DeGraff fled and lived under an assumed name for nearly a year before returning to Winston-Salem, where he was arrested, convicted, and hanged on February 8, 1894, before a crowd of thousands. He confessed from the gallows, saying her last words had been “Lord have mercy on me.”

Songs about the case appeared while DeGraff was still in jail. Legend credits DeGraff himself with the lyrics, though no account from the time backs this up. Another attribution points to Charles Pepper, a supporter who published “The Song of Peter DeGraff” in a Winston-Salem newspaper in 1893. Two early versions survive — one protesting DeGraff’s innocence, one confessing his guilt — sharing a meter and swapping verses so freely that most modern renditions blend the two. The older version was sung to the tune of the hymn “How Firm a Foundation.”

By Jarrell family account, Ben Jarrell — father of fiddler Tommy Jarrell — visited DeGraff in jail as a teenager and learned the song from him directly, a story passed down through Tommy. Henry Whitter made the first commercial recording in 1925, Molly O’Day’s 1949 Columbia side carried it into country and bluegrass repertoire.