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“Outside the Southern Border
Along a thoroughfare
Footprints by the highway
Vanished into air
“The man without a shadow
Slipped by in the night
Fate had turned the tables
Until the morning light”
Bayou Texan: A Memoir of Known Facts
The life and times of a Greenhorn told in story and song
It’s hard to find a starting point when it comes to how I ran across John Murrell. John Andrews Murrell – 1830 to 1844. The Great Western Land Pirate who once led a Mystic Clan with designs to take over the Deep South.
Cloaked in the guise of a Circuit Rider, frock coat and white collar, Murrell frequented the Old Natchez Trace where frontier congregations gathered under Brush Arbor to hear him rail. Master of skullduggery and deception, eloquent sermons kept believers spellbound while his gang plundered their goods.
Today, the Brush Arbor Churches are gone. The Old Natchez Trace is now a state park and leisurely drive from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi. No sign of The Great Western Land Pirate. Nor is there evidence of the vast criminal enterprise he once led to waylay travelers along ‘The Notchy’ and barter in sale of runaway slaves in the ‘Free State of Sabine.’
But there are those who claim he still haunts the Old Natchez Trace . . . ‘Notchy Run.’
Thats where I come in. Bayou Texan, a High Plains Kid with designs to Rock-and-Roll who encounters the ghost of ‘Reverend Devil on Music Row – 1950 to present time.
