I'll admit I was nervous about this one.
When I started writing The Hadley Witch song, I knew the outline of Mary Webster's story the way most of us in the Valley do. Half-Hanged Mary. The old woman Hadley strung up in the snow who wouldn't die. Margaret Atwood's dedication at the front of The Handmaid's Tale. But a ballad has to stand on more than a legend, so I went back to what the record actually says.
Here's what it says. Mary Reeve married William Webster, and they lived poor at the edge of Hadley. People there had whispered about her for years. In 1683 she was carried to Boston and tried for witchcraft, and the jury acquitted her. She came home to the same neighbors. That winter, 1684-85, Lieutenant Philip Smith, a deacon and a judge, fell sick and blamed her. A group of young men went to her house, dragged her out, hanged her from a tree, cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her there for dead.
In the morning she was still alive. Mary lived about eleven more years. Smith died that winter. Cotton Mather wrote the whole thing up as proof of witchcraft, and that account is a big part of why we still know her name.
I wrote the song around those facts, a fiddle and mandolin ballad that keeps moving the way the story does. I tried not to make her a cartoon witch or a saint. She was a sharp-tongued, poor old woman, and her town nearly killed her for it.
A note from Hadley
Last week I sent the song around to people who know this history far better than I do, including the Hadley Historical Society. On Thursday I heard back from Alan Weinberg, the Society's president. He wrote that he "really enjoyed" the song and found it "pretty accurate as well."
Coming from Hadley's own historians, that one landed. Alan asked if the Society could use the song in its programs and share it on its Facebook page and email list, and I told him yes, gladly. I also offered to record a short introduction they can play before it. If the Society plays it at a program this fall, Mary's story will be told in her own town, more than three hundred and forty years later, to people whose families walked the same roads.
Listen to The Hadley Witch on Bandcamp:
The NEPM Challenge
Here's the other thing going on with this song. If Monte Belmonte plays The Hadley Witch on The Fabulous 413, every cent the song earns goes to NEPM, our public radio station here in the Valley. The download is $1.50. So if you buy it, share it, or happen to mention it to Monte, you're helping make the case for local radio.
Every family has a Mary Webster
Mary's story survived because somebody wrote it down. Most family stories aren't that lucky. They get passed along at the kitchen table until only half of it is left: a great-grandfather who did something brave in a fire, an aunt who ran off to Boston, a farm the family lost in 1890 and nobody will say why.
That half-remembered part is what I go after. I dig through census records, old newspapers, land deeds and war files to find what really happened, and write it up for you. If you like, I'll turn it into a song the way I did for Mary, and for my own grandfather in The Ballad of Sergeant Kielty. It makes a Christmas present nobody else can give. Holiday orders close December 10.
Details are on the Research page:
So tell me in the comments: what's the story in your family that only half got told?
Adam Sweet
Verve, Granby, Massachusetts
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