Level: 2
Tuning: Dropped D

Blind Willie McTell recorded "Delia" in 1949, for the Library of Congress. It is a traditional ballad about the murder of Delia Green, a 14-year-old African-American girl from Georgia. In 1928, folklorist Robert Winslow Gordon reported to the Library of Congress that he had traced the song back to a murder in Savannah and that he had interviewed both Green's mother and the police officer who took Houston into custody. Gordon's research was never published, and Green's relationship to the popular songs was essentially unknown until Prof. John F. Garst, working from hints left by Gordon, turned up the details in Savannah newspaper archives.

The songs inspired by Green's murder now appear in two forms; both forms were staples of the "folk revival" of the 1950s and early 1960s. One version, usually attributed to Blake Alphonso Higgs, is known as "Delia's Gone". It is explicitly told from her killer's point of view. The second version, usually attributed to Blind Willie McTell, is usually known as "Delia" and is told from an ambiguous point of view.

David's arrangement is played in the Dropped D tuning (D A D G B E)