Content Warning: Misogyny and graphic descriptions that may be distressing. Also references dated attitudes.
Adam writes… At the second meeting of the Monday Night Music History Club at the end of November, we took a look at Murder Ballads. Murder Ballads, as the title suggests, are narrative songs where death by the hand of another human is put front and centre.
Presented variously as morality tales, or often miscarriages of justice and sometimes as comedy songs, they can be traced back at least to the 17th Century. They proliferated in American country music from the 19th century onwards and have deep roots in the folk music of Scandinavia and the British Isles.
One of our key observations at The Monday Night Music History Club was that these songs almost invariably feature a woman being killed by a man. In 17th Century ballads such as the Oxford Girl or Hanged I Shall Be, the songs are presented as a warning to young women on the evils of sexual promiscuity. By the 19th Century they have become clear shots fired at the first rumblings of suffrage: stay in line, know your place, or the consequences will be unspeakable (yet, paradoxically, not un-singable).
To get an idea of the flavour of Murder Ballads, here’s a playlist of three versions of the old English ballad Oxford Girl…
Here Come The Girls
Having discussed Murder Ballads in which women are the always the victims, I went off in search of Murder Ballads where women held the whip hand. And gun hand. And knife hand. And broken bottle hand. Songs in which the girls kill the boys in the ultimate, macabre expression of “right back atcha”.
My findings make up the following playlist Murder Ballads Side Two…
Track 1 is blues legend Bessie Smith wailing Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair (1928). This is an extraordinary plea for capital punishment from the accused in the courtroom dock. A crime of passion song, Bess has “done cut my good man’s throat” because he was fooling around. (He don’t sound like no good man to me, for what it’s worth.)
Track 2 is the first million-selling record in which a woman kills a man in the lyric – I Didn’t Know The Gun Was Loaded (1949). Patsy Montana’s gleeful vocal is accompanied by gunshot sound effects.
It’s presented as a comedy record. A “handsy” man gets the ultimate comuppance and the protagonist presents a flimsy plea of ignorance in her defence. (The lyric, in a prophetic coincidence which may come up in a pub quiz someday, features the shooting of a sheriff, predating Bob Marley by some 24 years.)
The Box It Came In (1966) by the wonderful Wanda Jackson is track 3. Her no good man has left her, taking everything with him – including her wedding dress. This is the only decent scrap of clothing she owned. He’s going to give it to his new woman. He left only “the box it came in”. And she promises to hunt him down and put him in a satin lined box all of his own…
No playlist on traditional murder ballads can be complete without Dolly Parton. Dolly is a major artist in the story of country music. Those of us who first came to Dolly Parton on TV in 1970s were introduced to the showiz Dolly. In recent years she’s really managed to claw back her reputation for being an authentic practitioner of Appalachian song. The Bridge (1968) [track 4] is a suicide song with a powerful, pleading vocal and a dramatic ending…
Into the 21st Century
Next up is Goodbye Earl (2000) by The Chicks, a mini-Thelma And Louise. It has a backstory, a beginning, middle and yay-saying end. No apologies, no regrets. In terms of women in murder ballads, we’ve turned a corner. Earl beats his wife. So Earl gets his – and is dumped in the lake and then the girls go for a picnic.
Track 5 is 1998’s Caleb Mayer by Gillian Welch and is altogether a darker affair in which our narrator murders her rapist. Against a haunting backdrop of guitar and mandolin strings, no detail is spared. We are 51 years and a million miles on from I Didn’t Know The Gun Was Loaded.
The song references a 1979 bluegrass number called Nellie Kane by Hot Rize in which a woman alone in a remote location is seduced by a passing stranger. Gillian Welch deftly opens up the ambiguities in the 1979 song. It leaves us with a lot to think about – not least that the ghost of her assailant clings to her forever in the unresolved chord at the end of the song. The Murder Ballad has arrived in the 21st Century.
The brilliant Valerie June (track 6) is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Memphis. In Shotgun (2013) stark bottleneck guitar roots this song firmly in the heritage of the Murder Ballad. But the echo-laden vocal is cold and psychotic. No back story, no plea, no justification. Just music in cold blood. The moral of the story is in the sound, plain for all to hear.
The last track is The Body Electric by Hurray For The Riff Raff.
This one references the harrowing detail of Oxford Girl – dumping a dead woman in the water (see also The Chicks). But this is no turn-the-tables celebration song, no don’t-get-mad-get-even manifesto. This is a plea for justice and fairness, a harrowing cry begging the question – when will women be safe? “It’s an old song,” the lyric goes, “we’ve heart it all before.” It goes on to ask… “Tell me what’s a man with a rifle in his hand/Gonna do for his daughter when it’s her turn to go?”
If you’d like more info on The Monday Night Music History Club, click HERE.
If you’d like to add a ballad to the playlist, drop me a line using the form below…
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