LOCATION: Alabama
PERIOD: July, 1955
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Lucas “Sonny Boy” Cooper (1925-1965); Charles Thomas Barbour (1933-1955); Jack Curry (1926-2014)
Lucas “Sonny Boy” Cooper (1925-1965) grew up in Jim Crow Alabama, 1940s-1950s and absorbed the prevailing attitudes about race, integration, and justice. Most people of the time still harbored resentments about the outcome of the Civil War, Federal interference in their society, and African-Americans in general.
This song takes place in the summer of 1955 when a gang of whites, Sonny Cooper among them, kidnap Charlie Barbur, not yet 22 at the time, and hang him. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Till’s murder and subsequent injustice deeply affected the Black community and galvanized a young generation of Black people to join the Civil Rights Movement.
For the next ten years Sonny Cooper was haunted by this lynching, and would himself die in a violent attack in 1965; killed by his half cousin in a fight.
THE PUPPET
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
A crow calls from somewhere,
Answered only by silence.
The peace that is out there,
Will soon be shattered by violence.
Sonny watches in the fading light,
Children playing in their yards.
Sonny won’t return until midnight;
Bitter, sad, scared, and scarred.
Jack arrives to pick him up,
Sonny hopes for the last time.
He joins the others in the truck,
Someone hands him a jar of moonshine.
They’re laughing, feeling good,
Excited in anticipation;
What they’re about is understood;
Sonny sweats in quiet resignation.
Sonny Cooper is a puppet,
Unsure of who’s pulling the strings.
He mostly avoids the subject;
It’s more complicated than it seems.
All his life Sonny’s heard:
“We must protect our culture;”
Charlie Barbour is a cardboard character,
“Just another black motherfucker.”
They were all pretty tight,
After drinking that whole jar.
Could hardly see the boy that night;
He looked blacker than a pot of tar.
They stop and jump out of the truck;
Grab him and tie his hands.
Just Charlie Barbour’s bad luck;
They could smell he shit his pants.
They found a tall oak tree,
Put a rope around Charlie’s neck.
The boy tried to break free;
Sonny’s nerves, by now, were a wreck.
It took longer than anyone had thought,
Seemed to take forever for him to die.
They stood and stared, no one talked;
1955, Alabama; July.
Sonny’s father and his father before him,
Taught Son what he should believe.
Sonny tries but can’t ignore them;
It’s a tragic inheritance he received.
Sonny won’t forget that tortured face,
The bulging eyes; the frozen grin.
It’s an image he can’t erase;
Sonny walks haunted by shame and sin.
© 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.
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