It was written on the walls and windowshades

Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault‘s album Seven Curses leads my list of favorite murder ballad albums. It’s not terribly traditional. Oddly enough, it’s not even especially grim. Erelli and Foucault’s selections are primarily 20th century murder ballads with known songwriters, and they vary the tone from witty to somber. They rarely venture into menacing.

They also make a very good choice, in my judgment, in including Paul Siebel‘s best known song, “Louise.” As we’ll hear, Louise meets an untimely and unpleasant end. Is she murdered? Perhaps. The more pertinent question may in fact be just how quickly she’s killed and by whom. “Louise” is a song wherein death by increments and the significance of the decorously averted gaze play key roles.

The proximate cause of Louise’s death is mostly irrelevant. Far more relevant is our sense of collective guilt and responsibility for it. There’s a little grief, and there’s a kind of mourning, but there’s also a visceral awakening to a certain kind of moral bankruptcy and a failure of timely compassion. In today’s post, we’ll listen to the song’s originator and some of its chief interpreters. We’ll also return to our occasional reflection on how artists match their arrangements to the material, and to how this work makes for a more or less effective murder ballad. Finally, we’ll put some thought to why this song is such a natural fit in the murder ballad genre, in the broad sense in which we’ve defined it.

Here’s “Louise” as it appeared on Siebel’s debut release, Woodsmoke and Oranges.

Lyrics

Siebel was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 60s, and put out a couple of albums between the folk era and the full bloom of the “singer-songwriter era” of the early 70s. You can hear this in the sound and structure of “Louise.” The chord progressions are more modern, the tone more personal than a traditional ballad or older folk song. Siebel toured the folk venue circuit for about 10 years, and then retired from professional music, taking a job with the Parks Department in Maryland.

Critics acclaimed both of Siebel’s albums, but “Louise” stands out as the best of his songs, and still does. The musician community, as we’ll soon see, agreed wholeheartedly, with a generous array of covers. Allan Jones writes in Uncut “The Lost Genius of Paul Siebel”:

And while the captivating “Then Came The Children” and the anti-war song “My Town” are lyrically allusive, powerfully allegorical, the best of his early songs – “Louise” and “Bride 1945” – are models of narrative clarity, deeply moving portraits of a lonely truckstop whore and a young war bride, the two women separately condemned to lives of mutual disappointment and serial unhappiness. If he’d never written anything else, these two songs alone would justify Siebel’s reputation as one of the finest songwriters of his time.

Jim Allan concurs in his assessment in American Songwriter “Paul Siebel: Journey of the Jack-Knife Gypsy”:

While the album was chock full of striking songs, it ultimately became best known for “Louise,” an elegiac narrative about the passing of a lady of the evening. More people came to know “Louise” through its many cover versions (most notably those of Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt) than Siebel’s original recording. “A lot of women [singers] picked it up,” says Siebel. “They liked the pathology of Louise and identified with that.” These more successful versions were good for the songwriter’s bank account, but didn’t do much for his own record sales.

Sometimes she cried

Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt both provide moving interpretations of the song. Ronstadt is a little more “country” in her approach. Her Silk Purse, like Siebel’s Woodsmoke and Oranges, appeared in 1970.

“Louise” is a Bonnie Raitt standard, and she provides the song with a warm, compassionate treatment.

You can see most of a Raitt performance of the song in the clip below.

You can also see and hear “Louise” as part of Raitt’s Road Tested performance in this clip here (cued to start in the 45th minute).

Whether or not Siebel is on-target with his assessment that women singers had a particular preference or sense of identification with the “pathology of Louise,” striking that cord of sympathy is the central challenge for the song’s interpreters–particularly as whether and to what extent we view Louise as part of our own community of moral concern is thematically crucial. Perhaps I can illustrate this with a few examples.

As I mentioned above, I think Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault hit the mark in their performance of the song. I’ve come to have great confidence in their, especially Foucault’s, aesthetic judgment.

Listen on Bandcamp here.

Similary, I think Leo Kottke, one of the better-known interpreters of the song, does quite well, with his trusty 12-string presenting a significant asset. He recorded the song on his 1972 album, Greenhouse.

Their intentions were easily traced

Now that I’ve provided a few examples of effective, sympathetic performances, I’ll illustrate what I’m getting at by way of contrast. James Luther Dickinson‘s Dixie Fried treatment of “Louise,” gives us a drunken, honky-tonk anthem. He’s not alone in this sort of breezy treatment of the song, to my ear quite at odds with the theme, but he definitely takes it all the way. Perhaps, giving him the benefit of the doubt, there is an intended irony here on his part to set the carefree arrangement at odds with the song as elegy or lament.

The danger of this breezy treatment is that it can wind up reinforcing the misogyny of the theme rather than problematizing it. The Blackbury Band‘s chummy, cowboy harmony version does this as well, unfortunately reinforced by their lyrical alteration of “their intentions were easily traced” to “her intentions were easily swayed.”

Speaking of lyrical variations, Jerry Jeff Walker‘s performance does a little “folk-processing” of its own. Although “Louise” has been widely covered, it’s sufficiently recent to have not strayed too far from the original, both in arrangement and lyrics. Walker appears to screw up the opening of the second verse, and salvages it, partly, by reworking its third line by alleging, “they always said she’d go that way.” I’m putting him on here primarily as one of the more prominent interpreters, not because of his improvisational moment.

Too bad it ended so ugly

I mentioned above that whether “Louise” is a murder ballad strictly speaking is a question that can’t be answered. Although the earlier signs that “sometimes she cried,” (and, perhaps, for you close readers, her time of death), suggests death by her own hand, the precise manner of the way “it ended so ugly” is left to the reader’s interpretation. This is, as I mentioned earlier, part of the genius of the song in that looking at, and looking away, are crucial moves for the witnesses inside the song and for us as listeners. Like many great works of art, “Louise,” engages the cooperation of the listener in filling out the details of the story.

If you want to hear a version, though, that will convince you that she was murdered, look no further than Bjørn Berge.  Berge’s twelve-string guitar treatment is very well done, but it’s his vocal quality that may suggest to you not only that she was murdered, but that he did it! I don’t mean Berge, of course, but the narrator he voices, as he voices him. It’s a riveting performance.

See here for a live performance from Berge (jumpy camera and audience noise).

Not Half Bad

One of the more innovative arrangements of the song comes from the recently disbanded Joy Kills Sorrow, on their 2006 eponymous release. I can’t find a version other than on Spotify.

Britain’s Porchlight Smoker also does a fabulous job. It’s almost a spoken-word presentation, with an open, spacious arrangement. (Spotify is all I can find here, too.)

I’ll add one more to my list of favorites before turning you over to my Spotify playlist to find your own. While I’m not a fan of the Ronstadtian octave leap at the end of the verses, I believed everything else I found in Sadie Shaw‘s moving performance of the song–although I subsequently discovered that she’s a bit of a deceiver (vocally) herself.

Women like Louise, they get by

Amid the variations, I’ve attempted to show that “Louise,” when played well, taps the elements of sympathy and elegy found in the best murder ballads. Without getting lost in trivially debating the “real” story behind the story, and whether Louise was actually murdered by an individual, I’ve attempted to show that her particular means of death is less important to the emotional core of the song than the sadness and collective guilt that the personae inside the song feel, not only for letting her die, but for their selective and partial concern for her while she lived. This is not to say that any had reason to feel responsible for the life she chose or a paternalistic obligation to keep her from it, but that having made that choice, regardless of the circumstances in which she made it, has not cut her off from our sphere of emotional and moral concern. In an important and emotionally relevant sense, there is no putting her down below our kind.

Our Spotify playlist has 44 performances of the song by close to 40 artists, including one of Siebel’s hometown contemporaries from the folk to singer-songwriter era transition, Eric Andersen. If you’re interested in the song, please start here, as I believe it’s a fairly comprehensive list of the performances available (at least to U.S. listeners). It so happens that “Louise” is also the title of a jazz standard, a blues standard, a song by the Human League, and the title of quite a few other original compositions. So, if this post has done no other service, it will at least, I hope, shorten this journey of exploration for you. After the playlist, I’ll throw in a few more YouTube versions that seem at least semi-professional and well done. As for the web-cam recordings from people’s dens, there are many, but you are on your own.

Thanks for reading and listening!