A cooling board is a board used to present a dead body. In winter months it would be difficult to bury the dead due to the earth being frozen, so the body is wrapped and propped in a barn until the ground thaws out. Referred to in a number of Blues songs, for example by Blind Willie McTell:.
Son House also makes a reference to a cooling board in his well known song Death Letter.
"So, I grabbed up my suitcase, and took off down the road. When I got there she was layin on a coolin' board."
Also found in a song by the late Donnie Hathaway:
"'cause the walls of my room was not the walls of my grave my bed was not my cooling board (y'all don't know what i'm talkin' 'bout)"
Joe Bonamassa uses this term in his song "Slow Train."
"Eighteen days in the cotton field Enough to put a man on a coolin' board!"
Benjamin B. French witnessed Abraham Lincoln's remains, after transfer from the Peterson House to the White House, being "taken from the box in which they were enclosed, all limp and warm, and laid upon the floor, and then stretched upon the cooling board."
Famous quotes containing the words cooling and/or board:
“As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)