March 04, 2002
Amazing story: On a mid-September

Amazing story:


On a mid-September day in 1959, an inmate in the Mississippi State Penitentiary named James Carter led some of his fellow prisoners in singing "Po Lazarus," a bluesy, melancholy old work song about a man who is hunted and gunned down by a sheriff with a .44.


In the course of a long, hard life that followed, Mr. Carter, a sharecropper's son, forgot about that day, the song and the man who captured it on tape, Alan Lomax.


Until about two weeks ago, when two people visited him in his Chicago apartment to give him some amazing news — and a $20,000 check.

Posted by Bill Stilwell at March 04, 2002 12:00 AM
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