"Don't Go Into That Barn"

'Real Gone', 2004

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When I wrote about “Day After Tomorrow,” I wrote about how, on Real Gone, Tom got capital-P political. He was writing songs ripped from the headlines—in that case, about the Iraq War.

“Don’t Go Into That Barn,” a few songs earlier on the album, takes it a step further. It is a song literally ripped from a headline.

The headline in question: “In a Barn, a Piece of Slavery's Hidden Past,” a May 2003 New York Times story. The article concerns the discovery of an old barn in Kentucky that houses the only surviving rural slave jail. Tom took his song title from the article’s opening paragraphs:

Even now, slowed by a stroke and 70 years past his boyhood toiling in the fields as a tenant farmer, Isaac Lang Jr. can still recall the terrible secrets hidden inside the old tobacco barn. 

“Dad told us never to go in there,” Mr. Lang, 84, recalled, sitting up in his bed in a nursing home here. ''He said, 'Boys, I'm going to tell you the truth. It's all right to play around that barn, but don't go inside.' He said it just wasn't right. That it was pitiful. He never did tell us why.''

There are several other direct lyrical borrowings from the article (and to be clear I’m not the first to discover this—shoutout as always to Tom Waits Library). Here are two in one verse:

Article: ''It was a slave ship turned upside down,'' said Mr. Westmoreland, a trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and himself the great-grandson of slaves.

Article: The vague outline of the barn's foundation is still imprinted in the alfalfa fields owned by Raymond Evers, 72, a retired Cincinnati steel contractor, and his wife, Mary, 75. They purchased the 280-acre farm and what they heard referred to as a ''jail cell'' in 1976. Mr. Evers spends weekends on the farm, growing alfalfa, corn and soybeans. He used the barn to store machinery and would occasionally unearth chains while plowing.

Tom Waits lyrics:
Out there like a slave ship upside down
Wrecked beneath the waves of grain
When the river is low
they find old bones and
when they plow they always dig up chains

Those are pretty direct. And a later lift is even more obvious still. Tom’s song ends with a bunch of cities listed in a row, the route for a journey. That precise route, and the phrasing, comes straight from the Times article.

Article: The jail's original chimney faced the Ohio River, the boundary between slavery and freedom and the same fickle water to which Captain Anderson, who is buried 100 yards from where the jail stood, marched his slave coffles. It was an eight-mile trek down the Walton Pike to the landing at Dover, Ky., where they would board flatboats for a perilous 1,150-mile journey: Dover to Covington, Covington to Louisville, Louisville to Henderson, Henderson to Smithland, Smithland to Memphis, Memphis to Vicksburg, Miss., and on to the infamous Natchez slave market.

Tom Waits lyrics:
No shirt, no coat
Take me on a flatboat
Dover down to Covington
Covington to Louisville
Louisville to Henderson
Henderson to Smithland
Smithland to Memphis
Memphis down to Vicksburg
Vicksburg to Natchez…

Many other lyrics come from the article in smaller ways. The line about “it's been cotton and soybeans, tobacco and corn,” all of which are mentioned in various parts the article as being grown in the area. “Behind the porticoed house of a long dead farm” refers to the “green hills in and around the Everses' farm are dotted with white porticoed homes.” I’m sure there are others too.

That article acts like a skeleton key to unlocking this song. Because Tom, as is his wont, makes the story weird and elliptical. I don’t know if you’d listen to the song above and immediately deduce “ah, it’s about former slave jail!” I certainly never did. Once you know the source, though, a lot of other lines make more sense.