William N. Robson presents another one of the “Suspense musicals” from the Lewis years, and it is broadcast live. Robert Horton stars in the Morton Fine and David Friedkin script. He plays Tom Dooley who is back home in North Carolina after fighting with the Confederate army in the Civil War. He is greatly disappointed to find his sweetheart engaged to a Yankee schoolmaster. He is so distraught that several incidents did not change his bitterness about her decision, and he killed her. He fails to get away, was captured, and sentenced to death. The line of the song “hang down your head, Tom Dooley” is an instruction to him to allow the hangman’s noose can be placed around his neck. At the time of this broadcast, the Kingston Trio rendition of the song was very popular and went to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Recordings of the Trio’s version were used in this broadcast.
Joseph Cotten starred in the 1953 production of the script, with Harry Stanton singing the famous ballad. Resources about the history of the song are at
https://suspenseproject.blogspot.com/2024/09/1953-03-30-tom-dooley.html
https://archive.org/details/TSP530330 is where recordings can be downloaded and streamed.
There are two surviving recordings in pleasing sound and the network recording is preferred because it was the way it was originally broadcast. The Armed Forces Radio Service recording (AFRS#700) is in similar enjoyable sound quality. For many years the only available recordings were heavily edited Armed Forces Radio station airchecks.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP581207
THE CAST
ROBERT HORTON (Tom Dooley), Hilda Hart [Virginia Gregg] (Laura Foster), Norm Alden (Cousin Noah), Robert Easton (Jess), Karl Swenson (Paul Grayson), Joe de Santis (Yankee), Tom Hanley, Bill James (Ad-Libs), George Walsh (Narrator)
Note that Virginia Gregg is using a pseudonym in this production. The reason is not known.
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