Frankie’s Ballad

The day that Frankie Silver was executed, legend has it that as she stood on the scaffold on the hill, which is now the corner of Valdese Avenue and White Street in Morganton, Sheriff John Boone asked if she had anything to say — she said yes, but she preferred to sing it.

This dreadful, dark and dismal day

Has swept my glories all away,

My sun goes down, my days are past,

And I must leave this world at last.

Oh! Lord, what will become of me?

I am condemned you all now see,

To heaven or hell my soul must fly

All in a moment when I die.

Judge Daniel has my sentence pass’d,

Those prison walls I leave at last,

Nothing to cheer my drooping head

Until I’m numbered with the dead.

But oh! that Dreadful Judge I fear;

Shall I that awful sentence hear:

“Depart ye cursed down to hell

And forever there to dwell?”

I know that frightful ghosts I’ll see

Gnawing their flesh in misery,

And then and there attended be

For murder in the first degree.

– As published in the Lenoir News Topic,
Wednesday, March 24, 1886