On May 1, 1868, Tom Dula stood on the gallows and swore he never harmed Laura Foster, then let them hang him anyway. Most people know him as Tom Dooley from the Kingston Trio's 1958 hit, but the real story is a post-Civil War tragedy in Wilkes County, North Carolina involving a Confederate veteran, three cousins named Anne Foster Melton, Laura Foster and Pauline Foster, a pregnancy, a shallow grave and a flight to Tennessee under a false name.

This episode untangles the historical man from the American myth: why the Appalachian dialect turned Dula into Dooley, how farmer James Grayson became the villain of folklore by coincidence, why former governor Zebulon Vance defended Dula for free while the New York Times covered the trial, and how Dula's testimony freed Anne while he was convicted twice. It then traces the ballad's oral lineage from  ...