The price of admission was a dime.
For 30 years, Anderson McCrew rode the American South. He wore a tuxedo. He sat in a wooden chair. He was dead. His story would later inspire The Legend of Andrew McCrew — but the facts are stranger than any ballad.
McCrew’s story began in November 1913 on a freight train through Marlin, Texas. Marlin was a Falls County cotton town of hot dust and slow-moving days. McCrew was a one-legged hobo riding the rails across the South. But in Marlin, he fell. He lost his remaining leg and bled to death on the side of the tracks.
Undertaker James Washington claimed the body. He embalmed McCrew with an experimental preservation fluid. That chemical cocktail turned flesh to something close to leather. Washington intended to hold the body until a relative came forward. None ever did.
For twelve months, McCrew sat in the window of Washington’s funeral parlor in Marlin. Townspeople walked past and stared. Children pressed their noses to the glass. Nobody recognized him. Nobody claimed him.
Then a carnival came through Marlin. And everything changed.
The Eighth Wonder of the World
The carnival owner noticed McCrew in the window. Carnival workers dressed him in a black tuxedo and propped him in a wooden chair. They sold tickets. They called him The Amazing Petrified Man. They also called him The Eighth Wonder of the World. The price of admission was a dime.
For three decades, McCrew bumped across the American South in the back of a carnival wagon. His name changed with every crowd. His dignity never returned.
When the carnival folded in the early 1960s, McCrew’s remains ended up in a Dallas warehouse. A woman named Elgie Pace found him there — chickens roosting on the lid of his coffin. Pace was a widowed nurse and mother of five with a fierce moral core. She loaded the coffin into the trunk of her car.
“He was a human being. You can’t just throw a body into a ditch.”
— Elgie Pace, Jet magazine, 1973
Pace kept McCrew in her basement for five years and called him Sam. She called medical schools. She called mortuaries. Nobody would help.
Then her story reached the papers — and Dallas undertaker Frank Lott stepped forward. Lott’s Mortuary would bury McCrew for free. On May 26, 1973 — sixty years after his death — Anderson McCrew went into the ground. His grave was at Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in southeast Dallas, near the banks of the Trinity River.
“I Saw That Mummy”
Across the country, a songwriter had been reading the New York Times.
Don McLean had already given the world American Pie and Vincent. He read the headline Mummy Buried in Dallas and felt the weight of it. He wrote The Legend of Andrew McCrew for his 1974 album Homeless Brother, produced by Joel Dorn. The song ran more than six minutes. It told McCrew’s story in the unsparing ballad form McLean brought to every story that moved him.
When McLean finished recording, he played it for his friend Lee Hays. Hays was the bass voice of the legendary folk quartet The Weavers. Hays had grown up in the South. He listened quietly. Then he said: “I saw that mummy.”
“He described the strange underworld of racism in the Deep South — carnivals with a Black, legless corpse dressed in a tuxedo. I realized the story behind the song I had written was much more than simply the facts in the Times.“
— Don McLean, 2019
The song found its moment on WGN Radio in Chicago. Host Roy Leonard played it and told McCrew’s story to his audience. Donations poured in for a headstone. McLean and Elgie Pace appeared together on Leonard’s show. Bob Williams of Chicago’s Jenson Corporation then covered the cost of the stone.
On December 8, 1974, a second ceremony took place at the grave. Two choirs — from SMU and Bishop College — sang. Anderson McCrew received a headstone inscribed with words McLean had written for the fourth verse of his song:
“Well, what a way to live a life, and what a way to die.
— Don McLean, “The Legend of Andrew McCrew,” 1974
Left to live a living death with no one left to cry.
A petrified amazement. A wonder beyond worth.
A man who found more life in death than life gave him at birth.”
The stone reads “Andrew McCrew” — McLean had changed the name for rhyming purposes. Nobody caught the error before the chisel fell. A footstone corrects the record: Anderson McCrew, ‘The Mummified Man.’ Born 1869. Died 1913. Buried 1973. Travelled for 60 years after death as a circus attraction.
Finding the Grave
You can still visit him today. Lincoln Memorial Cemetery sits in southeast Dallas off Buckner Boulevard and the C.F. Hawn Freeway. It’s a beautiful, quiet place — cedar and oak trees shade the older sections, and the Trinity River runs nearby. Blues greats Whistlin’ Alex Moore and Oran “Hot Lips” Page rest here too. Good company for a man who deserved better.
Drive through the front gate and head straight for about a quarter mile. Turn left when the dirt road dead-ends at a tree. Bear left at the fork. After the third road, his large black footstone will be the first one on your left.
McCrew came to Texas in 1913 and never left. He died here, went into the ground here, and found his song here. That happened because a Dallas nurse refused to leave a human being in a ditch. And because a folk singer from New York couldn’t shake a headline in the Times. That combination built one of the strangest monuments in American music. A tombstone engraved with song lyrics. Radio listeners in Chicago paid for it. And it honors a man whose name is still slightly wrong on the stone.
But the words are right. They have always been right.
***
For more on Texas music history, explore our listings for the Lubbock: Mac Davis Gravesite and Fort Worth: Ornette Coleman.