“Poor Ellen Smith” is a traditional murder ballad rooted in a real crime. On a July day in 1892, Ellen Smith, a young woman of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was shot and killed; a local man, Peter DeGraff, was convicted of the murder and hanged for it in 1894, confessing at the gallows before a large crowd.
A ballad about the killing began circulating soon afterward, and like many such songs it survives in several versions; some early ones borrowed the tune of the hymn “How Firm a Foundation.” Sung from a sorrowing, sometimes first-person point of view, it joined the long tradition of Southern murder ballads.
The song reached records in the 1920s and passed into old-time and bluegrass tradition.
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