The Ballad of Bobby Lung

Everyone knows “The Ballad of Bobby Lung.” It’s been around since the 1860s when Bobby Lung lived in Virginia, even though the first recording wasn’t made until 1931. The story’s been told every which way—sometimes Bobby dies in the end, sometimes he doesn’t.

Legend has it that Bobby Lung was as big as he was kind, with a toothy grin like a crescent moon and just as bright. Most people agree he was eight and a half feet tall. A 400-pound man, a real giant, and not the Herculean type: stocky, barrel-chested, neck thick as a Christmas ham. Were you ever to find yourself in a fight with Bobby Lung, they say, he could win sitting down and still only need one hand. But no one had ever been in a fight with Bobby, at least not a fair one.

Before anyone knew him, he lived alone in the woods near a small Virginian town, Opal. To this day, there still aren’t many people living there, probably 1,000 or so, but back then there was even less. Once hunters started telling stories about seeing him stalking the woods, Opal rumor had it that a giant was “at large.” That’s how the phrase started, see. Kids used him in their campfire stories, scaring the younger ones with talk of him plucking them out of their beds in the night, peeling their skin back and snacking on them like raw corn.

In the summer, it got so hot that all the people of Opal could manage was lounging by Germantown Lake—kids slapping water at each other, jumping off the dock into the crystal-green. A group of girls would swim out a ways from the shore, float on their backs for hours like water-bugs. The lake was known for being the deepest around. No one had ever touched or even seen the bottom.

One day, the parents on the shore heard screaming and saw arms flailing for help. A girl had gotten a cramp and swallowed some water and was drowning right before them. Sank straight to the bottom. A few of the dads dove off the pier, swam out there, but they couldn’t reach her that far down. Each one would emerge gasping for air, yelling out, cursing his own body. Then from out of the trees stomped Bobby Lung. It was the first time anyone had seen him up close, and he ran right into the water and swam out to the middle of the lake toward the girls. Women on the shore were screaming and fainting. The men in the water probably would’ve tried to fight him off, thinking Bobby up to no good, but they were panting and treading water like sick puppies. Bobby dove down below them and must’ve been under for ten minutes. It was the longest ten minutes in Opal history. Finally he surfaced, holding the girl out of the water with one hand above his head, not even out of breath. He brought her to the shore and laid her down in the sand. She looked dead as a doorknob. The townspeople circled, watched as Bobby Lung gave her mouth-to-mouth. They had no choice but to trust him. His hands were so large they covered her whole chest. After a few minutes, everyone around began giving up hope. She’s been under too long, swallowed too much water, her face too blue. But Bobby Lung breathed into that girl and pumped her chest until she coughed up that water and opened her eyes—eyes green and deep as the lake in which she’d died and warm as the sand on which come alive again.

From that day on, Bobby Lung was a hero in Opal. He got the name Bobby Lung for being able to hold his breath longer than any man who ever lived, for having lungs strong enough to bring a girl back from the dead. But not everyone was a fan of Bobby. “Rat-tooth” Tim Jameson was the meanest man in Virginia. He would kill a man just for looking at him funny. He’d escaped from Wise County jail the year before and been passing through small towns, lying low. He was only in Opal a few days, staying in the room above the brothel under a fake name.

Trouble started one day Rat-tooth Tim was in the bar, drunk as a sailor. Bobby ordered his drink and noticed Rat-tooth Tim next to him. Being the sweet man he was, Bobby turned to Rat-tooth Tim and welcomed him to town. He towered over the felon, who in turn thought Bobby was picking a fight. I don’t need no town giant telling me nothing. Bobby was nervous—Rat-tooth was giving him a mean eye—so he decided to talk about something else and pointed out that Rat-tooth’s front teeth were very thin and long, and he’d never seen any like them before. (Word was Tim Jameson got his teeth knocked out in a fight and had the dentist put in a pair of rat teeth in their place.) Upon hearing Bobby’s words, all ears in the bar perked up. The people of Opal knew about the man with rat’s teeth, but not what he looked like. Bobby was the first one to get him to open his mouth. When they realized a murderer was in their bar, the sheriff ran Rat-tooth Tim out of town, not even letting him finish his whiskey.

Rat-tooth Tim was a vengeful man, like the bad ones often are, and he didn’t stray too far from Opal before scratching that murder-itch. That night he snuck into Bobby’s cabin in the woods, knocked him over the head while he slept, and got his boys to help drag him out to the graveyard. There’d been a fresh grave ready for burying, but Rat-tooth and his men had dug it even deeper—30 feet deep—to make sure he couldn’t get out while they were filling him in. Bobby came to when he hit the bottom of the grave and took a deep breath before they started piling dirt on him.

A couple boys who’d been hanging in the graveyard that night saw the men throwing Bobby in the grave, and they snuck away unseen. Afraid of being in trouble for playing in the graveyard and being out past midnight, the boys didn’t tell anyone where Bobby was until three days later when the town started buzzing. Everyone was worried about Bobby, knowing the last time they saw him was the night Rat-tooth had been run out of town and something about that just didn’t feel right. When there began talk of a search party, the boys came clean. They pointed out the grave where they’d seen him thrown, and the townspeople got their shovels and started digging. No one worked that day; no one was in the bar. They took shifts in the hole, bucketing dirt up. The whole town came out to save Bobby Lung. The whole town worked together. It took them a few hours but eventually they dug the 30 feet. Anyone else would have been dead for days, but not Bobby. He burst out of the dirt gasping, alive and well. It took ten men to pull him out by the rope. He smiled that cheshire smile with eyes as rich and brown as the earth from which he’d just been pulled and warm as the hearts of the townspeople who’d pulled him.

And that was as close as you can get to the way it happened all those years ago. One of the men who’d dug him out, don’t know his name, wrote “The Ballad of Bobby Lung” commemorating what happened. Soon the song spread all over the South. Lead Belly made the first recording in 1931, and his lyrics more or less tell the same story. Unlike most blues songs, Lead Belly’s version had a happy ending: Bobby lived and the town saved him. It’s a funny thing, see—famous heroes are supposed to do the saving, but in Bobby’s story, it’s the town that did it. It was their love for him, their gratitude which made it so they could come together in those hard times and save a man who saved one of theirs. Sure, Bobby had bottomless lungs, and he wouldn’t’ve been alive without them, but no one would have saved a giant if that giant didn’t have a heart of gold. Lead Belly knew it, and he sang that song like it was the God’s honest truth. And nobody could deny it was true. It was the story that the country needed to hear. Times were hard all over, what with the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. People needed to hear a story with a happy ending, people coming together, and, most of all, a story of a man who could be buried underground, left for dead without air, and could still rise up again. People felt buried, in the dust, in the debt, in hunger, in pain. Bobby Lung gave them hope, and anyone who sang that song did so imaging himself with a little bit of Bobby in him. Imagining himself underground and with the strength to survive it.

After Lead Belly recorded his blues version, the thing caught like wildfire. Jelly Roll Morton did a jazz cover in 1938, which was much lighter than Lead Belly’s, piano instead of guitar. At the end, Jelly Roll added an extra verse about how, after the rescue, Rat-tooth Tim was captured and put in the same grave he threw Bobby in. On the recording, Jelly Roll talks for a minute or so before the song starts, saying “This is one of the early blues from Virginia, many years before I was born. Back then they saved their heroes. Now we kill our villains, see?” He was a funny guy, Jelly Roll. He was making a joke, saying that in 1938 people were more concerned with getting rid of evil instead of spreading good. He could’ve been idealizing the past, but no one could argue that “The Ballad of Bobby Lung” didn’t spell out a type of heaven. He couldn’t imagine a town in his day working together to save one man. People had their own problems. It’s not as if revenge didn’t exist in the 1860s, but their concern for Bobby didn’t seem that believable to Jelly Roll. People are into punishing evil, like somehow that keeps away the evil in them. Jelly Roll’s change to the ballad sparked an important idea in the story— who’s to say what’s better: getting rid of the bad or furthering the good?

The song continued as a blues standard while the details varied here and there—Bobby was nine feet tall, the grave was 20 feet deep—but the story stayed. It wasn’t until Bob Dylan got a hold of it in 1963 that Bobby Lung saw more changes. Bob Dylan was a sad guy sometimes, and he let Bobby die there in that hole. Instead of the people of Opal saving him, he changed the song to say that Rat-tooth buried him alive and since he couldn’t save himself and no one ever found out where he was, he’s in that 30-foot grave to this day. Some people say Bob Dylan saw himself as Bobby Lung, and he felt that if he’d found himself buried in a grave, nobody would have done for him what those people did for Bobby. He took away Bobby Lung’s survival which was, of course, not so much about how he felt the story should go but about people’s relationship to it. People needed Bobby to live and Dylan said no, you can’t just hold your breath. You’ve got to dig yourself out. Because everyone knew the story of Bobby Lung, Dylan’s version became a big part of that generation’s identity—no one was going save them but themselves. The phrase “I ain’t gonna hold my breath” became popular as a way of saying you’re not going wait around for someone to do something when you know they probably aren’t going to do it.

Kids today still know the original Bobby Lung, the man with bottomless lungs and an even bigger heart. When they’re playing in the pool, taking turns ducking underwater to see how long they can go without air, that’s in the name of Bobby Lung. We all played those games. It’s peaceful under there, below the surface. Sounds from above are muffled and your body feels lighter. To extend the peace, to calm your body—that’s Bobby Lung’s way. Sitting quietly in the earth like a seed. But it was the town who shined, because Bobby inspired them to. To this day, when a group of people work together to do something good—like raising money for a kid with cancer or something—it’s called “digging up Bobby.”

— 2011