“Omie Wise” — also “Naomi Wise” or “Little Omie Wise” — is a ballad about a killing in Randolph County, North Carolina, in 1807 or 1808, depending on the account. Naomi Wise was born in 1789 and orphaned in childhood, and worked as a bound servant in the household of William and Mary Adams. She was pregnant by Jonathan Lewis, a clerk from a local family who was courting someone of higher standing. She left with him on horseback one evening on a promise of marriage, and her body was found in the river. Lewis was arrested and jailed, escaped while awaiting trial, and was recaptured in 1811; he was tried and acquitted, apparently for lack of evidence, and is said to have confessed on his deathbed.
The ballad makes the story tidier. Its Naomi is lured to the river with promises of money and “fine things”; John Lewis tells her there that he means to drown her and leave her behind, and she begs for her life. Two boys fishing find her body floating, and Lewis is taken to jail with no friend or relative willing to stand his bail. The historical record, as Harold Schechter summarizes it, shows marks of strangulation, and scholars such as Eleanor Long-Wilgus have argued that the real Naomi was older and more experienced than the song suggests. The folklorist Kenneth Goldstein called the ballad probably North Carolina’s main contribution to American murder ballads, and noted that tradition had distorted the facts of Lewis’s punishment. According to Long-Wilgus’s study, most modern versions descend from an 1874 re-composition by Braxton Craven, whose fictionalized account of the case had appeared in a North Carolina newspaper in 1851.
Vernon Dalhart recorded it as “Naomi Wise” on 24 November 1925. G. B. Grayson recorded “Ommie Wise” in 1927 for Victor (21625, issued in October 1928), and that record was reissued in 1952 on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Shirley Collins sang it on her first LP, Sweet England (1959), and Pentangle on Reflection (1971).
Doc Watson recorded it for his 1964 Vanguard album Doc Watson. In 1964 Ralph Rinzler and Daniel Seeger also recorded Dolly Watson singing it, later released on The Watson Family Tradition; A. L. Lloyd’s notes there say Doc had known the song, perhaps from Grayson’s record, but had forgotten it until Dolly sang it to him. The Doc Watson Family included it on Treasures Untold (Vanguard, 1991), Doc and Merle Watson on Remembering Merle (Sugar Hill, 1992), Bill Evans on Native and Fine (Rounder, 1995), and the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience on Muddy Roads (Acoustic Disc, 2013).
