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:
“So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.”
—James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938)
“As a man-of-war that sails through the sea, so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)