Cowboy Copas, “Hangman’s Boogie” (1949)

[listen up!]

Cowboy Copas was a country singer out of Blue Creek, Ohio, who’s probably most famous now for dying in the same plane crash in 1963 that also took Patsy Cline. “Hangman’s Boogie” does not appear to be his best-known song but it’s one that has stuck with me since I found it in the Hillbilly Boogie box set (on the Proper label). I admit it took me a few turns to grok what’s going on here. I didn’t expect anything like it from a song with “boogie” in its title (which includes most of the 100 tunes on Hillbilly Boogie). The jaunty air of Copas’s vocal perfectly belies the doom and darkness of the scene he paints, with the singer scheduled for execution in the morning for rustling cattle: “I’m gonna do the boogie with the drop me beat / Just a corny rhythm where you swing your feet.” The song was written by Larry Cassidy, another obscure workaday midcentury country entertainer with perhaps a more morbid comical bent than usual, the author also of the seagoing disaster “Save the Alcohol” (“Save the kids and the women first, then save the alky-hall,” says the captain). Cowboy Copas can be found sitting on the back of a flatbed truck in the 1949 movie Square Dance Jubilee to sing this confounding upbeat tale of woe, which seems to play capital punishment for something of a lighthearted joke. (The movie is rated 4.0 by 61 people on IMDb, but I think it’s worth a look for the music. “Hangman’s Boogie” starts shortly after 31:00.) The song even invokes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and says outright but calmly, “It’s a doggone pity but I gotta go.” The last line and its foul image kept creeping up on me, amazed to find it so baldly in a song like this, softly hollering into eternity: “I’m gonna be dancing in the strangest way / Doing the hangman’s boogie at the break of day.”