“Philadelphia Lawyer” is a comic murder ballad written by Woody Guthrie in 1937. By Guthrie’s account, his singing partner Lefty Lou showed him a newspaper story about a Philadelphia lawyer shot dead in Reno, Nevada; he found it funny and turned it into a song, which he originally called “Reno Blues.” The melody came from an older tune.
The lyric is a wry tale of love and revenge out West: a smooth-talking Philadelphia lawyer courts a cowboy’s sweetheart, the cowboy catches them, and the lawyer ends up dead — a killing the song treats as rough frontier justice rather than tragedy.
Guthrie never recorded the song commercially. It became famous through the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who recorded it in 1949 under the title it carries today.