The Dead Men's Song / Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its Author Young Ewing Allison

MAN and NEWSPAPER MAN

Young Allison is a Kentuckian (Henderson, December 23, 1853) and proud of it with a pride that does not restrain him from seeing the peculiarities and frailties as well as the admirable traits of his fellow natives and skillfully putting them on paper to his own vast delight—and theirs too. What he gives, he is willing to take with Cromwell-like philosophy: “Paint me warts and all!” To speak of Allison in any sense whatever must be in the character of newspaper man, since to this work his whole life has been devoted. And if I may speak with well intentioned frankness: He’s a damn good editor, too! However little our lay friends may understand this message, aside from its emphasis, I rest secure in the thought that to the brotherhood it opens a wide vista of qualifications to which reams might be devoted without doing full justice to the subject. Today he might not be the ideal city editor, or night editor, or managing editor of our great modern miracle-machines called newspapers, but I have yet to meet the man who can more quickly absorb, analyze, sum-up and deliver an editorial opinion, so deliciously phrased and so nicely gauged. He who can do this is the embodiment of all staff editors!

If I may be pardoned for a moment, I will get myself associated with Allison and proceed with this relation. In 1888 he left daily newspaper work to found The Insurance Herald, though he continued old associations by occasional contributions, and in 1899 sold that publication and established The Insurance Field. In the fall of 1902 when presented with the opportunity of becoming editor-in-chief of The Daily Herald in Louisville, he gave up temporarily an active connection with The Insurance Field and in January, 1903, chose me to carry on this latter work, from which I am thankful to say he was absent only three years.

Allison is newspaper man through and through and was all but born in the business for he was “a devil in his own home town” of Henderson in a printing office when thirteen, “Y. E. Allison, Jr., Local Editor” on the village paper at fifteen and city reporter on a daily at seventeen. Up to this point in his career I might find a parallel for my own experience, but there the comparison abruptly ceases. He became a writer while I took to blacksmithing according to that roystering Chicagoan, Henry Barrett Chamberlin, who thinks because he once owned a paper called The Guardsman in days when a new subscription often meant breakfast for the two of us, that he is at liberty to cast javelins at my style of writing. And yet, to be perfectly frank, I have always been grateful for even his intimation that I had a “style.” Allison once accepted—I can hardly say enjoyed—one of those subscription breakfasts———But that is a matter not wholly concerned with his newspaper experience, which has extended through nearly all the daily “jobs:” reporter and city editor of The Evansville Journal, dramatic and city editor of The Louisville Courier-Journal; managing editor of The Louisville Commercial, and after a lapse of years as previously told, editor-in-chief of The Daily Herald.Fifteen years or more ago, long before we dreamed of being associated in business, Allison wrote me with the frankness that has characterized our friendship from the first, just how he came to enter newspaper work. Where he was concerned I was always “wanting to know” and he seemed ever willing to tell—me. The letter was as usual written in lead pencil on soft, spongy, ruled copy paper and that portion having reference to the subject named is given verbatim:

You see I lost two years going to school—from seven to nine years old. I was put out of all the private schools for incorrigible “inattention”—then it was discovered that I had been partially deaf and not guilty—but my schooling ended there and I was turned loose on my father’s library to get an education by main force—got it by reading everything—had read Rousseau’s “Confessions” at 14—and books replaced folks as companions. Wanted to get nearer to books and so hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at 13—great disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of my becoming a preacher—[hell of a preacher I would have made]. I had meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many stories and books, several epic poems—but one day the Old Man went home to dinner and left me only a scrap of “reprint” to set during his hour and a half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil about the Russian gentleman who started to drive from his country home to the city one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never “held copy” reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first time. The smell of printer’s ink has never since been out of my hair.

Allison’s newspaper years are rich with experience, for while he could never be classed as a Yellow Reformer, his caustic, or amusing, or pathetic pen, as the case demanded, has never been idle. Away back in the old days the gambling element in Louisville fairly “owned the town” and he attempted to curtail their power. They tried to cajole him and to bribe him and when both alike failed, intimidated the millionaire owner of the Commercial out from under him! He either had to sacrifice Allison or his street railway interests, and chose Allison to throw to the lions. But he made Mr. Dupont go the whole length and “fire” him! He wouldn’t resign when asked to do so. And of course while it all lasted Allison had his meed of personal amusement. For no editor ever took himself less seriously. Prominent citizens came with fair words and he listened to them and printed them; bribes were offered and accepted only for publication; while threats were received joyously and made the subject of half-whimsical comment.

As a newspaper man Allison prided himself on never having involved any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who wrote the “danger-stuff.” He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as “Cold Steel,” because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy was cut—the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon for a sobbing “blonde-girl story” when news was off—always said that when a party came in to complain of the hardship of an article, Allison talked to him so benevolently that the complainant always went away in tears, reflecting on how much worse it might have been if Allison hadn’t softened the article that seemed so raw. “Damned if I don’t believe he cries with ’em, too!” said Ryan. “If I had that sympathetic stop in my own voice I know I’d cry during ordinary conversations, just listening to myself.”

A drawing of a man's head, a cigarette clamped in his lips

Caricature by Wyncie King in Louisville Daily Herald

But of course the libel suit had to come to spoil an otherwise perfect record. And of course it was political and sprang out of a red-hot state campaign, while he was editor-in-chief of the Herald, in which his pen went deep enough to enrage the adversary and force the libel case. Like all political cases of this kind it was not a suit for damages, but an indictment for criminal libel, found by a complaisant political grand jury at the other end of the state—intended to cause the greatest amount of annoyance and to die out slowly. By that means it costs the accused both time and money while the state pays all expenses for the prosecution.

Judge “Bill” Smith, one of the greatest of Kentucky lawyers on constitutional points, or rather Judge William Smith of the Jefferson Circuit Court—because he has passed over now, taking his kindly and childlike, yet keen and resourceful personality out of life’s war for good and all—Judge Smith told me the story of that case one night after we had discussed down to the water-marks in the paper, his treasured copy of Burns. And at my very urgent solicitation he transcribed the salient features, not in all the intimate details of the spoken words, but with deep poetic feeling and rare conception of their human aspects. He wrote:

There are three poets in Burns. One is the poet you read; the second is the poet some mellow old Scot, with an edge on his tongue, recites to you; the third and most wonderful is the Burns that somebody with even a thin shred of a high voice sings to you. Burns is translated to the fourth power by singing him—without accompaniment—just the whinnying of a tenor or soprano voice, vibrant with feeling and pathos, at the right time of the evening, or in some penumbrous atmosphere of seclusion where memory can work its miracles.

I was defending Allison in that libel case and we started off on the 200-mile trip together. We had the smoker of the Pullman all to ourselves, and after I had recited some furlongs of Burns to him, he began to sing “Jockey’s Ta’en the Parting Kiss” in a sort of thin and whimpering quaver of a tenor that cut through the noise of the train like a violin note through silence. I thought I knew the poem, but it seemed to me I had never dreamed what was in it, with the wail of a Highland woman pouring plaintive melody through the flood gates of her heart. And he knew every one of them and sang them all with the tailing of the bag-pipes in the sound.

I wasn’t going down to practice law, but to practice patience and politics. I had been on that circuit for years and knew the court and the bar very well. So I said to Allison “Don’t you sing one of those songs again until I give the sign.” And the first thing I did was to bring him into touch with the circuit judge, who had the room adjoining mine at the hotel. He was a Burns lover, too; and besides as I had brought whiskey and as the town was prohibition, there was really nowhere else for the judge to spend his evenings. Soon we were capping back and forth, the judge and I, with Burns.

I don’t remember now—nobody ever remembers, after a cold, snowy night outside, between Burns quotations, hot whiskies, and reminiscences, exactly how anything happens—but about 10 o’clock, maybe, Allison was somewhere between “Jockey’s Ta’en the Parting Kiss,” “Bonnie Doon,” “Afton Water” and “Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast,” and the judge and I were looking deep into the coals of the grate and crying softly and unconsciously together. You see it wasn’t only the songs. Every damned one of us was Scotch-Irish and we just sat there and were transported back to the beginning of ourselves in the bare old primitive homes of us in farm and village, saw the log and coal fires of infancy blazing up again, and heard the voices of our mothers crooning and caressing those marvelous lines, and behind them their mothers crooning and wailing the same back in the unbroken line to Ayrshire and the Pentland Hills. And all life was just a look into yesterday and the troubles and the struggles of manhood fell right off as garments and left us boys again. That’s what’s in Burns, the singing poet. That is, when anybody knows how to sing him—not concert singers with artfulness, but just a singer with the right quaver and the whine of catgut in the voice and the tailing of Scotch pipes for the swells. It was perhaps two o’clock of the morning when we stood up, said “Little Willie’s Prayer” softly together, arms on shoulders, and the judge remarked:

“Allison, if you wrote like you sing Burns, maybe you wouldn’t be here—but it’s well worth the trouble!”

I knew then there was no more politics to practice—just law enough to be found to let the court stand firm when the time came.

The next night it was in the judge’s room. Half a dozen old followers of the circuit were there on the judge’s tip. “You bring your whiskey,” he said to me, privately, “or there’ll be none.” And I brought it. And between Burns and the bottle and the long low silences of good country-bred men listening back through the soft cadences of memory, the case was won that night. I think it was Jock’s song that did it. You never hear it sung by concert singers; because it has no theatricalism in it. It’s just the wailing of the faith of the country lass in her lover:

‘When the shades of evenin’ creep

O’er the day’s fair, gladsome e’e

Sound and safely may he sleep,

Sweetly blithe his waukenin’ be.

He will think on her he loves,

Fondly he’ll repeat her name,

For, where’er he distant roves,

Jockey’s heart is still at hame.’

If you listen right close you’ll hear the hiss of the kettle behind it, and you can see the glow of the firelight and smell the sap of green wood in the smoke.

Well, there were continuances; of course. It is never constitutional to throw a case of politics out of court too soon. We made that four hundred-mile round trip four times and, every time, Burns sat at night where Blackstone ruled by day. Never one word of the case from judge to accused, just continuances. But on the last night—the case was to be pressed next day—the judge said to Allison at the door, as he went off to bed:

“I think you will be before me in a case tomorrow. If the worst comes and you demand your right to address the jury, the court will sustain you. And I advise you give ’em ‘Jockey’s Ta’en the Parting Kiss’—and no more. I know the jury.”

But the case was dismissed; we were serenaded at the hotel and held a reception. Driving away in a buggy over the fourteen miles to the railway station, Allison said: “There never was a prettier summer-time jail anywhere in the world than this one. I’ve been down to see it. It has vines growing over the low, white-washed walls, there’s apple trees in the yard and the jailer has a curly headed little girl of six who would bring ‘em to you and could slip ‘em through the barred window by standing on the split bottom chair where her father sleeps in the shade after dinner. It’s a beautiful picture—but it hasn’t got a single damned modern convenience for winter and a six months’ term would have landed me there till January!”

I shall always believe this to be the most graceful, sympathetic and poetic relation involving a legal case I ever heard and never will cease to give thanks that my always strong and constantly growing admiration for Allison led me to insist upon its transcription.As soon as the trial fizzled I called on Allison at the Herald office, to extend congratulations and with eager requests for details.

“Well,” Allison ruminated, with that ever present twinkle in his eye, “my experience was very interesting. I found I had friends; and discovered traces of a family unknown to history claiming direct kinship with President Thomas Jefferson!”

When the “sports” brought about Allison’s discharge from the Commercial to stop his articles on the gambling control of Louisville, unconsciously they added a forceful factor to insurance publishing and I might truthfully say to the insurance business itself. I cannot begin to tell how much has been encompassed in these twenty-six years, but our bound volumes are full of his editorials and articles—the serious, the analytical, the constructive, the caustic, the witty and the amusing. He created The Piney Woods Clarion and in quotations from that mythical publication put a new light on the business. “Insurance Arabian Nights” which he declared were “translated from the Persian,” contained more of the odd conceits that fairly flowed from his pen and these two series, with a marine policy-form insuring the “contents” of Noah’s Ark, concocted in collaboration with good old Col. “Tige” Nelson (gone long ago, but not forgotten) are the classics of the business.

During his insurance newspaper work Allison was once called upon to give a public endorsement to a friend and very kindly expressed conviction that had his management continued “all the interest of the company would have been secured.” When later on he was forced to criticise extraordinary acts of this whilom friend, the endorsement was called up against him in a broadside affidavit, which he promptly reviewed in the most deliciously sarcastic editorial concluding:

And we do not hesitate to declare anew that “we believe if he had been continued as president, all the interests of the company would have been secured.” It was certainly not his fault that he did not secure more. Everything cannot be done in eleven months. But in the language of the far-Western tombstone it can be justly said, “He done what he could.”

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