Tag: Great Depression

“Barrow”

LOCATION: Texas and Louisiana
PERIOD: 1931-1934
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker (1910-1934); Clyde Chestnut “Champion” Barrow (1909–1934)

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker captured the imagination of Depression era America. Although their actual success at crime was a far cry from the myth, people were starving to be distracted from the dire reality of the dust bowl and economic devastation.

For about three years, 1931-1934, the “Barrow Gang” traveled Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri attempting to rob banks but more often small grocery stores or filling stations. Clyde was blamed for murders he didn’t commit. Criminal masterminds they were not, but the newspapers built them up into larger-than-life characters; publishing photographs of the couple that had been found at an abandoned hideout.

The portrayal in the press of Bonnie and Clyde was sometimes at odds with the reality of their life on the road, especially for Bonnie Parker. She was present at 100 or more felonies during the two years that she was Barrow’s companion, although she was not the cigar-smoking, machine gun-wielding killer depicted in the newspapers, newsreels, and pulp detective magazines of the day.

In May 1934 Frank Hamer, a legendary Texas Ranger, assembled a well-armed posse around Gibsland, Louisiana on Louisiana SR 154, not far from US 80, and they put over a hundred slugs into their bodies, bringing an end to their short but exciting run.

BARROW
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

He grew up a poor boy in Texas
A little smarter than the rest, and restless
He looked around and didn’t see no justice
The cards were stacked against a poor man
Told himself he’d not be poor again

She had honey golden hair and was so cute
Got away with anything she’d do
Loved the movies and said she’d be in one too
The dreams of a poor girl ain’t free
But nothin’ could dent her belief

He stole cars and robbed grocery stores
Then bigger crimes that could not be ignored
Killed a lawman, when they sent him down he swore
They’d never take him alive again
He’d die before he went back to the pen

When she met him she sure liked his flash
For a time they ran wild and fast
But even they knew it couldn’t last
A Texas Ranger was on their trail
Said he’d chase ‘em all the way to hell

Blamed for crimes they didn’t even commit
Magazines and newsreels reported it
Didn’t matter if the facts didn’t fit
That Ranger was closin’ in
There was just one way it could end

1934 saw widespread trouble
Folks started rooting for the fugitive couple
The Law staked ’em out with a lot of muscle
They never really had a chance
Those bullets sure made ’em dance

© 20195 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Lowndes County”

LOCATION: Lowndesboro, Alabama
PERIOD: 1933
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Lamar Hooper (1907-1969); Lowndnes County Sheriff; Lowndes County General Sessions Court Judge; teenage girl at jail

This song takes place in 1933, during the depth of the Depression in North Alabama. Lamar Hooper, Levi Hooper’s grandfather, was born on Sand Mountain and when he was in his early 30s chose to go south to look for work. He walked to the nearest road and then put up his thumb hoping for a ride.

It wasn’t long before a truck picked him up and brought him all to way to Lowndes County in the central part of the state. However, that night he got into a little trouble in Lowndesboro, a small town on Highway 80.

LOWNDES COUNTY
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Sand Mountain’s where I’m from
Traveling South on my thumb
Until I heard a jail door slam
In Lowndes County, Alabam’

I’d just been there a week or two
What they said I done, I did not do
They picked me up Saturday night
Charged me for damage and a fight

I told them it was self-defense
What I said made no difference
They held me over for trial,
“Be a few days,” they smiled

The Judge was deaf to my plea
“Son, you look guilty to me”
Thirty dollars or thirty days
Up to you, it’s all the same”

“Thirty dollars I ain’t got
I might as well sit in jail and rot”
Just came south to look for work
Never thought things’d be worse

Teenage girl brought me a plate
Then sat and watched as I ate
A biscuit and slice of ham
She even gave me some strawberry jam

Slipped the fork back through the bars
Said she’d come around after dark
If I could get myself free
She just might run away with me

Sheriff came to check my cell door
Said, “One day done, 29 more
Get some rest tomorrow you’ll work”
I fingered that fork under my shirt

They call this place Alabam’
But Hell is surely where I am
I forgot why I chose to come
Never should’ve left Sand Mountain

Don’t know why I chose to come
Never should’ve left Sand Mountain

© 2020 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Missouri”

LOCATION: Texarkana, Texas
PERIOD: 1930s
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Levi Lester Motts (1909-1999); Julia Taylor (1909-1931); Joshua Taylor (1877-1945)

During the 1920s and ’30s the boll weevil devastated the cotton crop in several Southern states along the Highway 80 corridor.  Many farmers gave up and left their farms since the weevil appeared to be impervious to all attempts to drive it out or kill it off.  Ironically the thing that finally caused the weevil to move on, was a widespread drought in 1930, which farmers did not see as much of a savior.  After the drought the Great Depression caused the remaining farmers who had managed to survive the weevil, as well as the drought, to be threatened yet again with economic collapse.

The West offered a virgin land, a territory full of promise.  The allure was irresistible for some men who uprooted themselves and often their entire families to try their luck “out West”.

Levi Luther Motts’ great-uncle was Levi Motts (1843-1864).

MISSOURI
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

There’s land in Missouri
I’ve heard tell it’s rich and dark
Ain’ nothin’ for me ’round here
I’d like to make a brand new start

Boll weevil killed my cotton
What drove him off was a drought
I’ve had enough of Texarkana
I’m thinkin’ hard of movin’ out

To Missouri – I’ll head west
Where a man can start fresh
I won’t rest until I’ve left
To Missouri I’m bound

Ol’ man Taylor thinks I’m lazy
Says soon it’s bound to rain
I should stick it out and make a crop
No matter where I go it’ll be the same

Since my Julie took sick and died
I’ve got no reason to stay
Texarkana is for Taylor
As for me, I’ll move away

To Missouri – I’ll head west
Where a man can start fresh
I won’t rest until I’ve left
To Missouri I’m bound

© 2019 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“My Pocketknife”

It took a couple of years longer than in other towns, but The Great Depression finally hit Oil City, Louisiana in 1932. The price of oil plummeted and work ground to a stop. They capped the wells and hauled the rigs away, to wait for better times. In 1934, out of all other options, Lee Allen McLemore and his thirteen year old son Charlie hit the road looking for work, and like many others head west to California.

Jake McLemore’s father was Charles Taylor “Charlie” McLemore.

Charlie grew up during the depression, traveling with his father, Lee Allen, on trains, with other hobos, with the putative goal of finding work. When the crash hit the oil industry, it took longer than for most other industries, but eventually the bottom fell out of the oil business in 1932. The wells were capped and the rigs hauled away, leaving the men who had depended upon the work stranded in small oil patch towns with no other opportunities for work. Many of them joined the large numbers of itinerant men riding the rails. Some looked for work but many had given up and made do as best they could.

But when we think of hobos riding in boxcars we don’t usually think of children doing the same thing. But when families had no money, little food and nothing on the horizon, they simply sent their children away to fend for themselves, as best they could.

“At the height of the Depression, as many as a million teenagers traveled the rails looking for work and community, moving in vagabond packs and living in hobo jungles, finding both charity and brutality in the broken-back cities of America. They crowded the cars and hid down in the tenders where the coal and water were stored; they squeezed between cars and clung atop their bucking roofs. In 1932, about 75 percent of the nearly six hundred thousand transients on the Southern Pacific line through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were under the age of twenty-five.”

“Fathers, and sometimes sons, stayed in the network of “jungles” along the route, tucked amid the timber and hidden from view. Each camp had its own division of labor—one person went into town to find a potato for soup while another brought salt or an extra spoon. Pots and pans hung from tree branches; crude shelters were made from cardboard or tin scrap and sometimes built up in the trees. Pocketknives were like gold in the jungles. Blades were “hired out” in exchange for soap or a bowl of stew. In a pinch, a knife could be traded for a pair of shoes or sold for cash. Men cooked possums and jackrabbits caught in snares along the brush lines and traded their hides for food.” (Mealer, Bryan. The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream. 2018.)

This was the kind of life Charlie McLemore lived during his childhood.

Charlie and his father worked picking cotton in California for a few weeks and also fruit when they could. They managed to work just enough to feed themselves, as well as, put a little aside. Eventually they got back to Oil City just as things were starting to come back.

By the time World War II started, and a need for oil exploded, Charlie was in his late teens. His father got work immediately at a refinery and from then on, the Lee McLemore family did okay.

Charlie went into the oil business as well, but oil was not the only resource product that supported the Oil City economy. Natural gas was even more abundant and Charlie got a job at United Gas Corporation, headquartered in Shreveport, Louisiana, and moved his family there in 1960 a year after Jake was born.

Charlie worked at United Gas and survived the hostile takeover by Pennzoil in 1968, and became part of the management of Pennzoil United, Inc. He did pretty well, well enough to send his son Jake to Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Retiring at the age of 70 in 1991, Charlie lived long enough to see Jake get married and have children. Charles Taylor McLemore died in 2001 at the age of 80 from a heart attack a few months before 9/11, and several years before his grandson Lee’s death in 2004 in Iraq.

Despite surviving the Great Depression by riding the rails with his father, he was among the generation that experienced the economic boom after WWII. Charlie McLemore saw nothing in his lifetime that undermined his faith in the American Dream. A dream he lived out to the fullest.

MY POCKETKNIFE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Charlie and his father crawl up the embankment
Hidden by the bend they crouch and wait
The train’ll have to slow down maybe just enough
With any luck they’ll grab that freight

Charlie and his father left Oil City at dawn
Somethin’ called The Depression had arrived
Work was for the takin’ out in California
Pickin’ cotton under sunny skies

Long as I have my pocketknife
I’ll be alright, be alright
I can make it through the coldest night
Long as I have my pocketknife

Charlie and his father join a migrant army
Ride the rails with tramps an’ hoboes
Tent camps were jungles, danger everywhere
Do your best to hang on to your coat

Charlie and his father dodge a railroad bull
Hidin’ in the tender ’til he’s gone
A man was crumpled in the corner, frozen overnight
It’s a damp and cold L.A. dawn

Long as I have my pocketknife
I’ll be alright, be alright
I can make it through the coldest night
Long as I have my pocketknife

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Homer and April, Virgil and June”

LOCATION: Texas: Big Spring, Van Horn, Mexico
PERIOD: 1925-1944
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Homer Hardin (1902-1985); Virgil Hardin (1902-1992); April Johnson (1907-1986); June johnson (1907-1988); John Farley Hardin (1927-2020); Henry Adams Hardin (1928-2015).

Twin brothers, Homer (1902-1985) and Virgil Hardin (1902-1992) married twin sisters, April (1907-1986) and June Johnson (1907-1988). This was 1925 in west Texas. However, their forebears had come a long way to get here.

They had come from the northeast, across the Appalachian mountains. They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from Ireland and Scotland. They took up land and built one-and two-room cabins and left them unpainted.  Married among themselves, produced children, and added more rooms as needed, and did not paint them either.

Their descendants planted cotton and corn in the bottom land and in hidden hollers made whiskey from the corn and traded or sold what they did not drink. Some went still further west into Texas, where they found life freer, but harsher.

These were the Scots-Irish, who were accustomed to moving on when times got rough, starting over, and creating new lives in the unsettled frontier. Rejecting civilization as represented by lawyers and bankers, and above all, any form of government.

In the case of the Hardins and Johnsons, after they married, they enjoyed about four years of prosperity before the Great Depression hit Big Spring, Texas. And like generations of Scots-Irish before them,  they took all their belongings and went looking for a better life with a cow and two pigs.

They were heading to El Paso, the largest town in their region, but did not make it. Circumstances forced them to stop in Van Horn, Texas, a little northeast of El Paso.

Here they started over and made a hard-scrabble subsistence life there. However, once they were old enough, the two oldest boys, John and Henry, decided to strike out on their own and try their luck further west.  Repeating the same generations-old pattern of their people.

HOMER AND APRIL, VIRGIL AND JUNE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

May of nineteen and twenty-five;
Them Hardin twins married the Johnson girls,
Homer and April, Virgil and June.
The world was their oyster, their love the pearl.
First few years were happy and carefree,
Both couples were with children blessed.
Then the Depression hit Big Spring;
They loaded up two wagons and they left.
 
Dusk that first day one wagon broke down. 
A bent old man came limping up the road,
“They’s worse weather a-coming;
Hard weather. Be foretold.”
That night high winds, driving rain;
Hail bounced upon the ground like small pale eggs.
The women sought shelter under a wagon;
The horses moaned on the trembling legs.
 
It was peaceful in the morning after the storm,
The women began collecting their scattered goods.
Their food was all ruined, so Virgil took the gun:
Headed to a small stand of cottonwoods.
The horses were skittish, the wagons soggy,
Virg had got a rabbit; they ate, then headed out.
April and June started singing from a hymnbook;
Despite what they’d been through, they remained unbowed.
 
When they started out they hoped to make El Paso,
But only got as far as Van Horn.
Homer and Virgil scouted around,
Found some land they thought might make a decent farm.
They built two cabins, side by side;
Added more rooms with each new child.
No matter how hard they worked each year,
On that harsh land, fortune never smiled.
 
The two oldest boys were growing restless,
In the summer of 19 and 44.
They were old enough to have an adventure,
But still too young to be called off to war.
They left with no warning, well before dawn;
Crossed the Rio Grande, and rode still further west.
At dusk they eyed the sun in its setting;
The western sky a bloody red.

© 2025 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“Lamar and Katherine Fall in Love”

After Katherine pulled one of her disappearing acts, Lamar followed and found her in Tuscaloosa.  She’d been partying with a bunch of college kids, living life large. This was 1928, and for a couple of years, this was their life which was typical during the “Jazz Age.”

But since all good things must come to an end, so did this in October 1929, and The Depression.

Kathy and Lamar did what most young people do when trouble finds them: they went home, to Montgomery.  There Lamar went to work at his father’s mill, and Katherine settled into the life as wife and mother.

Location: Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Alabama
Period: 1928-1931
Dramatis personae: Katherine George (1910); Lamar Hooper (1907-1969)

LAMAR AND KATHERINE FALL IN LOVE
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)

Lamar finally found Katherine;
On a barge, partyin’
Been goin’ for a couple of weeks;
It was nineteen and twenty eight;
Th’ height of the Jazz Age;
They hardly stop’d to eat or sleep.
Ain’ the way it’s spose to happen, but it did;
They fell in love.

Hung ‘roun Tuscaloosa awhile
Livin’ large, goin’ wild;
Drinkin’ too much, makin’ new friends.
Katherine led and Lamar tagged along,
Out every night dusk to dawn;
Burning their candle at both ends.
They were young, just a coupla kids;
When they fell in love.

You don’t choose,
The one who’ll break your heart;
All you can do,
Is play your little part.
Tha’s why they call it fallin’ when it does;
You’re in love.

Right about then the Depression hit,
These two kids hit the skids;
So they went back home to Magomry.
Lamar got a job at his daddy’s mill,
They lived in a little house on a hill;
Settled down and started a family.
Just the way it’s spose to happen, and it did;
They’re in love.
 
Lamar made a little bootleg shine,
But didn’t drink at all this time;
Katherine was famous for her fig preserves.
She called him Pop, he called her Mother;
Had one child after another,
After three Kath still had her curves.
They were young, but no longer kids;
And they were in love.
 
You don’t choose,
The one who’ll break your heart;
All you can do,
Is play your little part.
Tha’s why they call it fallin’ when it does;
You’re in love.

© 2023 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

“My Pocketknife”

It took a couple of years longer than in other towns, but The Great Depression finally hit Oil City, Louisiana in 1932.  The price of oil plummeted and work ground to a stop.  They capped the wells and hauled the rigs away, to wait for better times.  In 1934, out of all other options, Lee Allen McLemore and his thirteen year old son Charlie hit the road looking for work, and like many others head west to California.

MY POCKETKNIFE
(F.D. Leone, Jr.)

Charlie and his father crawl up the embankment
Hidden by the bend they crouch and wait
The train’ll have to slow down maybe just enough
With any luck they’ll grab that freight

Charlie and his father left Oil City at dawn
Somethin’ called The Depression had arrived
Work was for the takin’ out in California
Pickin’ cotton under sunny skies

Long as I have my pocketknife
I’ll be alright, be alright
I can make it through the coldest night
Long as I have my pocketknife

Charlie and his father join a migrant army
Ride the rails with tramps an’ hoboes
Tent camps were jungles, danger everywhere
Do your best to hang on to your coat

Charlie and his father dodge a railroad bull
Hidin’ in the tender ’til he’s gone
A man was crumpled in the corner, frozen overnight
It’s a damp and cold L.A. dawn

Long as I have my pocketknife …

© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Charles Taylor “Charlie” McLemore (1921-2001)

Jake McLemore’s father was Charles Taylor “Charlie” McLemore.

Charlie grew up during the depression, traveling with his father, Lee Allen, on trains, with other hobos, with the putative goal of finding work. When the crash hit the oil industry, it took longer than for most other industries, but eventually the bottom fell out of the oil business in 1932. The wells were capped and the rigs hauled away, leaving the men who had depended upon the work stranded in small oil patch towns with no other opportunities for work. Many of them joined the large numbers of itinerant men riding the rails. Some looked for work but many had given up and made do as best they could.

But when we think of hobos riding in boxcars we don’t usually think of children doing the same thing. But when families had no money, little food and nothing on the horizon, they simply sent their children away to fend for themselves, as best they could.

“At the height of the Depression, as many as a million teenagers traveled the rails looking for work and community, moving in vagabond packs and living in hobo jungles, finding both charity and brutality in the broken-back cities of America. They crowded the cars and hid down in the tenders where the coal and water were stored; they squeezed between cars and clung atop their bucking roofs. In 1932, about 75 percent of the nearly six hundred thousand transients on the Southern Pacific line through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were under the age of twenty-five.”

“Fathers, and sometimes sons, stayed in the network of “jungles” along the route, tucked amid the timber and hidden from view. Each camp had its own division of labor—one person went into town to find a potato for soup while another brought salt or an extra spoon. Pots and pans hung from tree branches; crude shelters were made from cardboard or tin scrap and sometimes built up in the trees. Pocketknives were like gold in the jungles. Blades were “hired out” in exchange for soap or a bowl of stew. In a pinch, a knife could be traded for a pair of shoes or sold for cash. Men cooked possums and jackrabbits caught in snares along the brush lines and traded their hides for food.” (Mealer, Bryan. The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family’s Search for the American Dream. 2018.)

This was the kind of life Charlie McLemore lived during his childhood.

Charlie and his father worked picking cotton in California for a few weeks and also fruit when they could. They managed to work just enough to feed themselves, as well as, put a little aside. Eventually they got back to Oil City just as things were starting to come back.

By the time World War II started, and a need for oil exploded, Charlie was in his late teens. His father got work immediately at a refinery and from then on, the Lee McLemore family did okay.

Charlie went into the oil business as well, but oil was not the only resource product that supported the Oil City economy. Natural gas was even more abundant and Charlie got a job at United Gas Corporation, headquartered in Shreveport, Louisiana, and moved his family there in 1960 a year after Jake was born.

Charlie worked at United Gas and survived the hostile takeover by Pennzoil in 1968, and became part of the management of Pennzoil United, Inc. He did pretty well, well enough to send his son Jake to Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Retiring at the age of 70 in 1991, Charlie lived long enough to see Jake get married and have children.  Charles Taylor McLemore died in 2001 at the age of 80 from a heart attack a few months before 9/11, and several years before his grandson Lee’s death in 2004 in Iraq.

Despite surviving the Great Depression by riding the rails with his father, he was among the generation that experienced the economic boom after WWII.  Charlie McLemore saw nothing in his lifetime that undermined his faith in the American Dream.  A dream he lived out to the fullest.

Bessie Carson Grant (1932)

Bessie Carson Grant was born during the Great Depression to a bootlegger and his wife, pilot car driver Millie Carson Sparks. Shortly after Bessie was born Millie gradually made fewer and fewer trips running her husband’s contraband whiskey. But despite quitting the bootlegging life she still had to give testimony in the great whiskey trial of 1935, which she did with little Bessie on her lap, as a three year old toddler (see song, “Lucy’s Grandma on Her Momma’s Side“.

During the Great Depression, children suffered a lot. They no longer had the joys and freedoms of childhood, and often shared their parents’ burdens and issues on money. For Christmas and birthdays, very few children were able to have fancy toy. Some families made gifts themselves, but many others could not afford food at all. For most people, the only way to celebrate holidays with gifts, were to window-shop. Since children lacked food, they often suffered from malnutrition.

There are two schools of thought about the impact of the Great Depression on children. One school holds that the hard times left young people physically damaged and psychologically scarred. The other insists that the decade of dire want and desperate wandering served to strengthen their character and forge what became America’s “greatest generation” of the World War II era. In fact, children’s experience of the depression varied widely, depending on their age, race, sex, region, and individual family circumstances. Nevertheless, certain patterns have emerged. Demographically, birthrates fell during the decade to a low of 18 births per 1,000 population, and children’s health declined due to the poorer nutrition and health care available.

Economically, many children worked both inside and outside the home; girls babysat or cleaned house, boys hustled papers or shined shoes, and both ran errands and picked crops. Yet the scarcity of jobs led record numbers of children to remain in school longer. Socially, high school became a typical teenage experience for the first time. A record 65 percent of teens attended high school in 1936; they spent the better part of their days together, forming their own cliques and looking to each other for advice and approval. Thus arose the idea of a separate, teenage generation.

This is the sociological phenomenon that formed Bessie Grant. Yes, she was tempered in the crucible of economic hardship, but at the same time it caused her to develop an almost pathological concern for financial security. As an adult,a  mother and wife, Bessie was prone to be frugal to the point of denying herself and her family any kind of “luxury item,” which might include a book, or candy, or anything that might represent fun.

Gradually she softened up, especially once she came to trust on the capability of her husband Walter Calahan Walker who was a hard worked and good provider. While Bessie may have scrimped on her children, of which she had four, she doted on her grandchildren. Bessie’s children were often heard to jokingly complain about how she never allowed them such-and-such that she happily acquiesced to when it concerned one of her grandchildren.

Bessie’s favorite grandchild was Lucy Bess Cooper, the youngest girl of her second child, Mae Ella. When she found out what happened to Lucy, it broke her heart and she never forgave Mae Ella for keeping so much of Lucy’s life secret from her (see song, “When Louanne Met Lucy in Prison“).

Bessie has seen her children grow up and their children grow up into fine people. She enjoys helping Mae Ella raise Lucy’s boy, McCoy, the one Lucy had in prison (see song, “Lucy’s Grandma“).

After Walter passed away in 2001, Mae Ella invited Bessie to move in with her, which she did.