The Ballad of Mr. Plessy: Original Music About History

Mr. Sule Greg Wilson recorded his new original, The Ballad of Homer Plessy in a studio in Phoenix, Arizona as part of his participation in the John Brown Project’s Pushing the Rock film

The song tells the story of Mister Homer Plessy, of New Orleans, Louisiana; a shoemaker and civil rights activist whose light skin tone made it easy to buy a first-class train ticket for seating in the ‘white-only’ section: a Jim Crow segregation law in effect in the late nineteenth century. Plessy sat down and the conductor demanded he get up and get out. Plessy was arrested and jailed for the crime of sitting on a train. His case went up to the United States Supreme Court as a test for the racial segregation laws sweeping post reconstruction America, The segregationist SCOTUS justices deemed separate to be equal, even though the definitions o0f the two words are completely different.

This bogus ruling by a radical racist court ushered in decades of suffering, discrimination, and undo hardship for many Americans until the Brown v. Board of Education rulings reversed in in 1954.

The song features Sule Greg Wilson on gourd banjo, percussion (frame drum, shekere, big gourd, and tambo), and vocals and Ralph White on fiddle. Recorded at Three Leaf Recording in Phoenix, AZ in late October, 2024 in collaboration with the John Brown Project for the documentary film we are working on, Pushing the Rock. The recording weas partially funded by the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Video production is by Dan Morrison of the John Brown Project.