Recently I watched a television special on the loss of the Edmond Fitzgerald on the Great Lakes and Gordon Lightfoot’s hit song about her. It made me think of another song about a wrecked boat.

It was one in which there was no loss of life, only the loss of a legend. It was not some distant disaster, only death by neglect on the banks of the Mississippi River at Memphis. The vessel was the Mary Elizabeth, better known as Proud Mary.

Years ago I recall reading an article in the Commercial Appeal about the uncertain fate of the Mary Elizabeth, which was all but abandoned and docked at Memphis. The article was in the paper’s Feb. 14, 1978, edition and began, “The Mary Elizabeth, a 74-foot tugboat about which the popular song ‘Proud Mary’ was written, isn’t proud these days. The boat is tied to the dock at Murphy Marine Service Inc., a Memphis towboat company on Presidents Island. Its hull is rusting, a section of the deckhouse is scorched from a fire and wrecked by a barge that crashed into it. The paint is peeling.”

A couple of years later I saw a photo in the paper of the boat torn up and beached on the riverbank at Memphis. I saved the photo, but until about six years ago I did not think much about it. Then in 2019 I was at an Art for E.B. fundraiser that Lee Gibson was having in Starkville. Hanging at the show was a beautiful painting that looked like the old photo from the Commercial Appeal. When I asked Lee about the painting, she said she painted it from a photo she had seen. Though I thought I recognized it from the photo I had seen years before of the Proud Mary beached at Memphis, I had to do some digging and confirm it.

Research on the boat showed a fascinating history much deeper than the song by John Fogerty that was a major hit for both Credence Clearwater Revival and Ike and Tina Turner.

The Proud Mary was constructed in New York in 1905 and named the Sarah Jenks and then the Ossining. She operated on the Hudson River ferrying prisoners from New York City to Sing-Sing State Prison. It was from her carrying prisoners upriver to the Sing-Sing Prison that the saying “sent up the river” originated.

In 1911, she was sold to the Mississippi River and the St. Tammany Steamship Company of Covington, Louisiana. There, she served as a ferry on Lake Pontchartrain. She was sold again, and in 1915 carried mail between Greenville and Arkansas.

Her move to Memphis as a tow boat came in 1928. There, she took the name Mary Elizabeth and engaged in several different types of commerce, even rescue missions during the Mississippi River floods of 1935 and 1937. She was taken out of service in 1978 and sold for scrap in 1979.

In the following years an unsuccessful effort was made to save her. It was while she was beached on the riverbank at Memphis and had been partly scrapped that her image was preserved by the photo I recall and the painting by Lee.

The song “Proud Mary” was written by John Fogerty, though there is a tradition in Memphis that a deckhand on the Mary Elizabeth had written the original version around 1961.

Of course, I do need to add a little history of songs that are about the Tombigbee River. The oldest song I have encountered specifically about the Tombigbee is “Tom-Big-Bee River or the Gum Tree Canoe“ The song begins:

On the Tombigbee River so bright I was born
In a hut made of husks of the tall yellow corn
It was there I first met with my Julia so true
And I rowed her about in my gum tree canoe

The song was written by S.S. Steele and first published in 1847 in Plantation Melodies. It became a popular minstrel song of the mid-to-late-1800s.

Most of the surviving songs from the Tombigbee are actually work chants of the deckhands on steamboats. I have come across three of them. Two are from the 1870s and one from the 1930s. These chants are part of an African American music tradition that was one of the forerunners of the Blues.

E.R. Hopkins, who grew up in my house, the Ole Homestead, recalled hearing songs and work chants at the Columbus steamboat landing. Two boats that were mentioned in one of the chants, the William S. Holt and John T. Moore, provide a date range as they were in the Columbus-Mobile trade between 1871 and 1879.

The chorus of that work chant was:

The William S. Holt and the John T. Moore
All them boats are mine.
Oh see the boat go round the bend,
Goodbye my lover goodbye
Loaded with Columbus men,
Goodbye my lover goodbye.

Another old chant used on the Alabama River was:

Sally is a good gal,
And a bad one too,
Oh Sally, oh gal.

In 1940, John Lomax interviewed Richard Amerson in Livingston, Alabama. Amerson had been a roustabout on a steamboat that ran between Selma and Mobile on the Alabama River. As a roustabout, he helped load and unload sacks of fertilizer, 500-pound bales of cotton and large barrels of molasses that were carried by steamboats. When loading and unloading a boat their work chant was:

Go git yo’ sack!
Whoa back buddy, whoa back!
I got a coat here to fit yo’ back!

We hear songs such as The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald about distant waters without realizing there is a wonderful heritage of songs and chants from times when steamboats from Columbus and Aberdeen plied the Tombigbee and Alabama Rivers in the Mobile trade.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

READER FAVORITES

• 

  Our View: Selfish people don’t plant flowers

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 2 days ago

• 

  Slimantics: Redistricting by another name is no less offensive

  By Slim Smith • 20 hours ago

• 

  Our View: We don’t want to hear, ‘there’s nothing to do’

  By Dispatch Editorial Board • 20 hours ago