How I fell in love with a song called Delia

I fell in love with a song called Delia a few years ago. It’s an old blues song. Traced to the early 1900s when the blues was in its infancy.

It’s one of those haunting tunes generations of singers have passed down to each other, like a whisper. People like Reese Du Pree, Blind Willie McTell, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan.

It’s about a murder that took place on Christmas Eve in 1900, in the Yamacraw neighbourhood of Savannah, Georgia, in the United States.

Two African Americans, Mose “Cooney” Houston and his girlfriend, Delia Green, were at a house party. The pair had only been together a few months but Houston, who was drunk, was big-noting himself in front of the guests, telling everyone he’d been sleeping with Green.

Green called him a liar and a son of a bitch, offending his ego.

“That is a damn lie,” Houston spat back. “You know I have had you as many times as I have fingers and toes.”

Houston was asked to leave the party. On his way out the door he stopped and pulled a pistol and shot Green in the groin, then bolted.

He was chased down and caught by the owner of the house. He confessed to the shooting, saying he’d do it again because she’d called him a son of a bitch.

Green was carried to her mother’s house a block away, where she died a few hours later, around 3am on Christmas Day.

The murder was so shocking it was reported in the local papers and Houston’s trial was eagerly covered when it started a few months later.

What made it newsworthy? Houston and Green were just kids. Only 14 years old.

A young teenage boy had been bragging at a party about sleeping with his girlfriend, then shot her dead when she called him a liar.

His age would play a crucial role in the trial. He was tried as an adult because Georgia didn’t have a separate juvenile court system in 1901. The jury took pity on him, and he was given a life sentence rather than the noose. Delia was buried in an unmarked grave.

The newspaper editors didn’t like it. Despite the leniency shown to Houston, dispatches from the courtroom portrayed the boy as ungrateful. He had apparently thanked the judge and walked out cheerily. When a sheriff’s deputy asked him what he thought of his sentence, Houston said “I don’t like it at all, but I guess I’ll have to stand it.”

The public was left with the impression that Houston had beaten the system.

Within a handful of years, the murder had been turned into a blues song, the identity of the composer unknown.

We know the facts of the real life story because of the work of the ballad expert John Garst, and the folklorist Robert W Gordon, who collected dozens of versions of the song. Sean Wilentz, the renowned Dylan biographer, has written about it beautifully in Bob Dylan in America.

When you discover the song’s origins, and read about the journey it’s taken over the decades, you can learn more about the blues in one sitting than from years of passive listening.

You understand how various versions of the song (“Delia”, “Delia’s Gone,” “One More Rounder Gone”) percolated in the US south for decades, and travelled to the Bahamas and back eventually, giving it two distinct musical branches.

How critical details of the story were forgotten. The earliest versions of the song make no reference to Houston’s or Delia’s age, so a powerful dramatic element of the story was never exploited by generations of singers.

How references to race were subtly dropped as the years went by. “Cooney” eventually becomes “Cutty” or “Curtis” or “Tony.”

And you appreciate how popular culture can reproduce sexism and misogyny. Every version of the song I’ve heard is sung from Houston’s perspective. Delia is never given a voice. The poor girl’s dead, murdered by her immature boyfriend, and all we hear are complaints from the boy about how he’s in jail and lost all his friends. Delia is often described as a gambler, or a prostitute.

Dylan’s version of the song, released in 1993, is a special one. He discovered pathos in the story that had long been forgotten.

He starts his retelling with a well-worn but inventive description of Delia:

He then anchors every verse with the refrain “All the friends I ever had are gone”, which doesn’t make sense at the beginning of the song, but which clicks towards the end when you realise the refrain is being sung by Curtis – from prison.

We hear about the grief of Delia’s parents, about Curtis’s paranoia about being spotted by people in the street, about Curtis’s hatred of people richer and classier than him. And we can’t avoid his murderous jealousy.

Curtis is a pathetic figure. Delia never stood a chance. It affects me every time I listen to it.

• Do you have a story about the moment of discovery when a pastime became a passion? Send your essay of no more than 800 words to cif.australia@theguardian.com.