Tom Waits, our honorary gatekeeper for this post

Today we wrap up our second year of blogging at Murder Ballad Monday, heading toward our regularly scheduled December holiday. This is our 239th post, and with it, we will click over 360,000 page views over the life of the blog. We may have an incidental post or two during our hiatus, but won’t be getting back to regular Monday posts until January 2014. I hope this post will tide you over.

In the past few months, Pat’s done some excellent curating of “Essential Eleven” lists of traditional and non-traditional murder ballads. I’ve thought about how I might do this myself, and haven’t yet come up with a scheme that works for me, or does anything beyond pile on to the selections I’ve already made. Quite often the songs I pick are my favorites anyway. Instead, I thought that for our final regular post of 2013, I would provide you with a little insight on what posts have been the most read by our readers. It’s a stand-in, I suppose, for your list of favorites. With a little more time and some technical savvy, we might introduce a survey one of these days and find out. We’ve always been more art than science anyway, so this will do the trick, I think.

The Grateful Dead

The one potential downside of this approach is that it’s a little too “inside baseball,” with various distracting non-musical details about the kinds of things that drive hits to the blog. But, as I looked at the list, I think we see a pretty good index of some legitimate hit songs. In most cases, I would judge that the song drives the popularity of the post more than anything else. The other thing about this rating scheme is that it favors our older posts. I’ll address that below, and maybe someday I’ll do the math and make an update later to account for that.

The list below represents the posts that that have received the most total page views since the start of the blog–a “Deadly Dozen,” if you will, but a baker’s dozen. I’m going to try to keep it quick, with just a little bit of text and one sample of each song, but click the links for more.

1. Jack Straw

It’s a magical combination of the Grateful Dead, John Steinbeck, John Malkovich, and a little bit of Robert Burns, perhaps, but Robert Hunter’s “Jack Straw” started strong and keeps on going. Legions of loyal Deadheads and the fact that it is our one entry so far that is listed as a Wikipedia source for a song certainly help. Pat’s excellent analysis of the song is not to be underestimated, though, with themes of post-WWII international reconciliation emerging from this seemingly quintessentially American Western murder ballad.

2. 1000 Places to Go with Her

This post is one of a few on our list that is not the lead post for its week. Shaleane’s exploration of “Frank’s Wild Years, ” by Tom Waits, took us on a “short, wild little ride,” replete with matrimony, misogyny, marketing, and murder.

Waits’s spoken word tale of suburban desolation draws in Waits fans, chihuahua seekers, and perhaps most pertinently, people really curious about who married Tom Waits. This post about their extraordinary brand of personal and artistic partnership of Waits with wife Kathleen Brennan has been satisfying inquiring minds for well over a year.

3. On a Hill Lone and Gray

Cary Fridley

I’m under no illusions that this Carter Family classic attracted murder ballad fans on its own. In February 2012, I reviewed a few popular songs that address the death of Jesus in musical terms similar to those of murder ballads. For quite a period of time, we were a leading image search hit for the term “Golgotha.” Nevertheless, our week with these popular takes on the Jesus story gave us some perspective on how some murder ballads relate to still older themes and religious stories of suffering and sacrifice–and, we had a little Kung Fu connection, to boot.

Cary Fridley’s performance of “On a Hill Lone and Gray” gives a fresh dose of the original Carter spirit, faithful to the original in a number of ways, but without an overdose of pathos and piety.

4. 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

Our post on Richard Thompson’s romantic modern classic, a love story complicated by the presence of a motorcycle, has drawn readers’ interest since it hit the highway in 2012. The first of several posts this week paid particular attention to the element of risk in Thompson’s performance and the difference it makes in our experience of the song.

Here’s a nice, intimate performance, just for you (with a playlist path to many others).

5. Excitable Boy

Pat’s second post in a week discussing the artistry of Warren Zevon brings out werewolf hunters and those on the tracks of a legendary, headless gunner. Pat discusses Zevon’s songwriting process and how seemingly incidental factors contribute to extraordinarily evocative art. Never has so much depended on a pot roast.

6. Pancho and Lefty

Townes Van Zandt’s brilliant cipher of a song has brought out not only numerous readers, but has been the post to garner the most reader discussion of any on our blog. Readers have weighed in on their own interpretations of what happened to whom and why, and true to the point of the post, consensus proves happily elusive.

Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt

Although Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris both provide extraordinary performances of this song, we’ll stick with TVZ, from 1993, a mere four years before he slipped away.

7. Powderfinger

Shaleane’s first post on Neil Young’s classic begins a remarkable voyage of literary detective work, where she finds the hidden backstory to the song, and presses through to discover how this is one song where the part without the words is the most meaningful.

8. Murder in the Red Barn

This post, on Tom Waits’s masterful updating of the “Red Barn” murder ballad strand, is our lone entrant on this list from 2013, appearing in March. Kathleen Brennan is doubtless bound up in the conspiracy to bring readers into this post, but Waits’s post-modern musical trip into the truth shows how much of it you might find when you leave the facts behind.

9. Why dois your brand sae drip wi’ bluid?

Pat’s third post on the Child Ballad “Edward” enlists one of our favorite bands, The Old Blind Dogs, to assist in telling the story of a murder and things yet still more foul. That week was one of unpleasant but irresistable revelation, aided in part by a good bit of Freudian psychoanalytical theory, to discover some themes we didn’t know were there.

10. Demon Lover/The House Carpenter

This week was great fun for me, digging up the history of Child Ballad 243, and this post now appears to be serving as a resource to the curious. Indeed, we’re grateful to Dr. Perkins’s AP English class in Honolulu for giving this post a recent boost. But, that’s not all of it–this week also attracted fans of the band Hurt to the blog for that band’s extraordinary take on the song, and our friends at Sirius XM Radio’s The Village also gave consideration to my thesis that Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” is a contemporary reworking of this enduring ballad.

Illustration for “Man in the Long Black Coat” (Dylan’s other sequel to “House Carpenter”)

Tracking down the variants of this ballad was an enlightening and demanding task, charting out in part how the American context changed the song’s presentation, leading us to consider different themes of accountability and agency, among other things. There are more variants than I can shake a stick at, but I’ll give you Hurt’s modern version here as a testament to this ballad’s continuing vitality. If you want to look further, and listen to more straightforward and traditional retellings, you can check out our Spotify playlist for it here.

House Carpenter (live) from HURT on Myspace.

11. Maid Freed from the Gallows/Gallows Pole

Shaleane got the Led out for us with her discussion of Child Ballad 95 in 2012. She traces the song’s lineage from English fairy tale to its contemporary retelling in the hands of Messrs. Plant and Page, et al. The original tale goes in at least two different directions, and although Zeppelin’s version is perhaps the most well-known, Shaleane traces part of the songs descent in the hands (and voices) of Leadbelly, Jean Ritchie, Bela Bartok, and several others.

12. The Essex

An iconic tale from America’s past draws in readers to hear songwriter Michael Lewis’s retelling of the tragedy of the whaleship Essex. The story of this doomed ship and its survivors served as part of the inspiration for Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. The whale’s assault on the ship, while strange, fades in significance as the Essex’s castaways find themselves pushed to unimaginable extremes of self-sacrifice and survival.

We were most fortunate to be able to interview Michael Lewis about his work of putting this extraordinary song together, and grateful as well for the clip of the song he provided for us to use for the blog.

13. Cruel is the Snow — The Massacre of Glencoe, pt. 2

Rounding out our baker’s dozen of posts is the second installment of Tom’s discussion on “The Massacre of Glencoe” telling an ancient Scottish story of clan rivalries and betrayal. Although the story is old, the song is relatively new, and opens the door a wee bit in Tom’s ongoing discussion of how these songs reflect Scottish consciousness and identity through the years.

Another way to slice it

Long-time readers will note that we often give over an entire week to songs, using and in fact needing multiple posts to do them justice. Therefore, another way to look at a song’s popularity among our readers is to see how many readers we had for an entire week. So, below, in much more cursory form, I’ll give you an indication of our most popular weeks for each year of the blog.  I also should acknowledge here the several fine weeks that Pat devoted to “The Two Sisters” (start here) and “Stack-o-lee” (start here) across multiple weeks, which represent some terrific work on those songs, and a lot of return visits.

2012 (these mostly track the “Deadly Dozen” list above)

Hurt

1. “Jack Straw” (One, Two, Three)
2. “Frank’s Wild Years” (One, Two, Three)
3. “Demon Lover”/”House Carpenter” (One, Two, Three, Four)
4. “Edward” (One, Two, Three, Four)
5. Jesus and the Murder Ballad (One, Two, Three, Four)
6. Warren Zevon (One, Two, Three)
7. “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” (One, Two, Three, Four)
8. “Powderfinger” (One, Two, Three)
9. “Those Three Are On My Mind” (One, Two, Three, Four)
10. “Pancho and Lefty” (One, Two, Three)

Jon Langford

2013 (only the first of these would have made the 2012 top 10)

1. “Maria Marten”/”Murder in the Red Barn” (One, Two, Three)
2. “Who Killed Cock Robin [et al.]?” (One, Two, Three, Four, Five)
3. “Duncan and Brady” (One, Two, Three)
4. “Tom Dooley” (One, Two, Three, Four, Five)
5. Alison Cuddy’s conversation with Jon Langford (One, Two, Three)
6. “Billy Gray” (One, Two, Three)
7. “Katy Dear”/”Silver Dagger” (One, Two, Three)
8. “I’ll Lay You Down”/Interview with Eileen (One, Two, Three)
9. “Every Mother’s Son”/”In the Ghetto” (One, Two, Three)
10. “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” (One, Two)

Until 2014

As I mentioned earlier, we might have a few incidental posts over the next month or so, but we don’t plan to return to our regular schedule until January. It’s been quite a year for us, as we’ve added three new bloggers. We’re looking forward to the break, but I for one am already starting to queue up songs I’d like to look into when 2014 arrives. It’s been a busy year, personally and professionally for all of us, so I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to keep up with the precise kind of schedule we’ve been keeping, but we know we have unfinished business. We will keep the conversation going.

Screen capture from Steve Martin’s video interpretation of  “El Paso”

Just listening to the songs included in this post reminds me of why these songs continue to move me deeply and capture my imagination. This blog has deepened this sense of attachment, and if you were to ask me what are the posts that most affected me, I don’t know that I could give a coherently rank-ordered list. But, I would point back to moments like the time I stumbled upon Lyle Lovett’s version of “Mack the Knife”; or when I strangely got sentimental watching Steve Martin’s silly send-up of “El Paso” at the end of my week with that song; or the power I found in Pete Seeger’s vision of the real meaning of democratic citizenship and sacrifice in “Those Three are on My Mind.” There are discoveries and work I’m quite proud of, including the explorations of “Frankie and Johnny,” “Tom Dooley,” and “The Demon Lover”/”House Carpenter.”

None of that means much absent what you’ve been able to find here, which I hope has turned you on to some new music or perhaps provided a depth of understanding and breadth of context not previously there. We’re grateful to the artists who have made this work possible, directly or indirectly, and hope to have more engaging conversations ahead. We’re tremendously grateful to you for reading and listening in, and look forward to more great music in the new year.

Coda

Just so this post is not entirely ground we’ve covered before, and as both a reward for having read this far and perhaps a foretaste of things to come, I’ll leave you with one more song–“Tin Angel,” from Bob Dylan’s album Tempest. There’s far more to get into in this one than we have time or space for here, but consider it a sign of a promise to keep…eventually.