Jeffrey Foucault and Mark Erelli

This is the second post this week on Norman Blake’s “Billy Gray.”  Read the first here.

Outlaw Rhetoric

That I haven’t read Aristotle‘s Poetics yet is a gap in my education.  I’ll need to get right on that, as it would doubtless help me here.  I know something about it, though, and I have read Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, and so I’ll make do. [In the meantime, I’ll try to recover from the embarrassment that this soul-baring, literary confession in a public blog causes me…]

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains the three levers of persuasion: logos, pathos, and ethos.  Logos is the appeal to reason, pathos is the appeal to the emotions, and ethos is the appeal to the character of the speaker.  The latter is quite important, as people will largely remain unpersuaded and unmoved by the best and most impassioned arguments if they don’t trust the person speaking in the first place. It’s not necessarily doubts about the speaker’s moral character. The listener just senses a misalignment between their perceptions of who the speaker is and what he or she is saying.

For instance, however good my brief argument is below, a bunch of you aren’t going to buy it because I’m coming off as overly intellectual by quoting an ancient Greek philosopher in a post about a made-up song about a dead cowboy. Others of you aren’t going to buy it because you actually know more about this than I do, and you don’t trust anybody writing about art who hasn’t yet read the Poetics.

I noticed something curious when reviewing covers of Norman Blake’s “Billy Gray” for the posts this week. (Today, I’m going to focus on American covers.  In the next post, I’ll follow the song eastward across the Atlantic.) I noticed that the song has been covered far more often by men than by women. I also found very few of the women’s performances of the song as compelling as most of the men’s performances. In other words, they didn’t persuade me.

The first point about the percentage of performers is objective data.  The second may just be a function of my taste. I think the first point, though, suggests that I may be on to something with my second.  Although both lead characters are mere sketches, I wondered at first whether Billy Gray is the more compelling character in the song, evoking that dynamic of sin, redemption, and death.  (If you didn’t already know that I hadn’t read the Poetics yet, I’d probably make some comment here about catharsis.)  Sarah is a less interesting character. Perhaps male singers subconsciously lead us to empathize with Billy; female singers with Sarah. Perhaps cultural assumptions about masculinity and the outlaw affect how we connect with the song and who sings it.

I asked Pat about this issue. To put it bluntly, I was trying to figure out whether I was onto something interesting or onto something stupid. He’s remarkably helpful to me in sorting out when I’m onto something stupid.  He mentioned that Marty Robbins’s “El Paso” isn’t really covered by too many female artists either.  “El Paso” is a first-person narrative, though.  That might make some of the difference, but it’s not as simple as that.

As Pat has discussed previously, “Cold Rain and Snow“ is a first-person narrative that works particularly well in women’s voices.  As I’ve mentioned before, “Omie Wise” is a third-person murder ballad that does particularly well in women’s voices.  Whatever truth there may be to the matter is therefore likely nuanced and complex.  As Pat said to me, “it’s got to have something to do with the assumptions inherent in the way we perceive the narratives.”

Which groups of voices, generally speaking, more easily match the song may just be a matter of taste. Among the versions of “Billy Gray” I’ve listened to, with two exceptions, women’s voices generally send this already romantic cowboy song into cloying territory.  This can happen because of the arrangement, too, but it easily happens with the voice. I think this song is helped by a certain roughness embedded somewhere within it.  Not better or worse singers; just the character of the voices.

There are any number of songs that I really like that I can’t pull off very well, or at least very easily, as a singer.  However much I might be able to get inside “Down in the Willow Garden,” John Prine’s “Paradise,” or Greg Brown’s “Lord, I Have Made You a Place in My Heart” and sing them well, my covering Barry White’s “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything,” or Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” would take more than a little doing to be believable.  My imaginary Lauper cover would sound insulting at first blush, at least.  I do think I’ll work on the Barry White though.

This aesthetic issue doesn’t necessarily involve the sex of the performer either.  I expect I would find a version of “Billy Gray” performed by Placido Domingo lacking too, relative to the more homespun charm of Norman Blake.

I don’t mean to say that a woman can’t perform this song compellingly. I’ll disprove that idea below. Doing so, though, may be a greater or at least a different artistic challenge.  “Billy Gray” is an interesting case for observing the relationship between the performer and the song, and the delicate work that goes into arranging a song relative to its narrative and an audience’s assumptions. Performing the song is like acting it, inhabiting it in some way.

Tying back, by way of analogy, to the discussion of rhetoric above, let’s assume the quality of the musicianship is analogous to the logos, or argument, and the sentimental appeal of the song’s story is the pathos.  In order to be “persuaded” by the song, the character of the singer’s style, or ethos, also has to be convincing–there has to be a fit, a match, a congruence. Importantly, it needs to be in balance with the other two factors.

It’s possible that what represents “convincing” here is closely tied to the “sexist and archaic” cultural framework that Bill James outlines and the folk duo, Eileen, so thoughtfully challenges.  Maybe we “believe” male singers of this song more because we connect them more easily with Billy the outlaw, or with “sexist and archaic” notions of moral identity and moral failure. I’m not saying this should be the case, but suggesting that it might be a force at work in how we hear the song.

“Billy Gray” is quite sentimental and sweet. The best performances, in general, are those that cut that back or shade this aspect at least a little bit.  Perhaps they rein in the pathos with the ethos. I’ll share with you a few of my preferred versions, with a couple other examples to illustrate the contrast. I won’t be encyclopedic. Keep in mind also that I’m staying on the west side of the Atlantic in this post.

American voices

Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault‘s 2010 album Seven Curses is one of my favorite albums of murder ballads.  Erelli and Foucault provide excellent and faithful duet performances of mostly modern iterations of the genre.  It’s a tricky collection to pull off, but there’s enough of a mix of menace, mirth, and romance to make it work. Here’s their cover of “Billy Gray”:

Here’s the studio version on Myspace and on Spotify.

Robert Earl Keen‘s performance of “Billy Gray”  on his 1998 album Walking Distance is also quite good.  It’s a thicker arrangement than Erelli & Foucault’s, but the lead and harmony vocals work well.  The instrumentation gives some sense of wide-open Western night skies.

Here it is on Keen’s Myspace and on Spotify.

To give you an idea of the contrast I’m talking about, where subtle matters of arrangement and voice take the song wide of the mark,  I’d point out Michael Martin Murphey’s cover, which is a duet version, and Bob and Dana Kogut, where Dana takes the lead.  You may disagree with me, but I think you’ll hear the difference.

There are too many subtle changes to count here, but the overall result for me is one that diminishes the song’s effectiveness.

I’m not making the simplistic claim that women artists can’t perform this song effectively.  I’m merely noting that few seem to try, and that the obstacles to success appear somewhat greater, either because of the content of the story or our cultural assumptions about it.

As further proof of my qualified thesis, I’ll offer that Katy Moffatt gives one of the best performances of this song among all the interpreters I’ve heard. One factor in its success is that her version is the only one I’ve found that includes a ranchera style guitar back-up.  The song has always been a bit of a hybrid–a Western set within the genre of Blake’s north Georgia old-timey sound.  Moffatt gives us echoes of “El Paso,” a proper forebear of “Billy Gray,” and a musical setting fitting to the imagined Western landscape of the song.  More importantly, her singing manages to encompass the landscape and the action of the song, providing perfect tone to the telling of Billy and Sarah’s sad tale. She inhabits the song and makes us believe it.

Next up

In the next post, we’ll chat with an interpreter of the song from the Auld Country. We’ll also listen to performances from artists from Ireland and Scotland.

Coda:  Folk process

You’ll probably notice that I once again failed miserably in delivering on my promise of a short post.  Before I completely close this one out, I wanted to make one more observation. I mentioned in my previous post that “Billy Gray,” was something of an instant classic when released in 1975.  Sing Out! magazine’s editors observed later that they appreciated finding an original song that sounded like it came from the tradition.

In the some forty years (almost) since he penned it, many musicians have taken a turn with Blake’s tune.  It may be Blake’s laid-back performance style (at least outwardly laid-back). Perhaps there’s a certain looseness in the lyrical meter of the song that leads singers to fuss with the verses.  It could be that there are lots of small narrative details–difficult to remember and easy to change. Whatever it is, it’s my rough impression that the folk process is already underway in earnest on this song.

Sometimes the singer renames the song, or renames a character–Sarah MacRae or Sarah MacLean? Sometimes we hear a new narrative detail or two, or a mondegreen.  Cover artists often introduce one or two changes into a song to make it their own.  It may just be an impression on my part, but the scale and pace of “refining” here seems greater.  It may be that many others see this song as Sing Out! did–as part of a shared tradition rather than something distinctively owned by Blake. Commensurately, they have started to work with it, changing his lyrics aggressively. We have reason to doubt, though, that adding polish to it actually improves it.

Here’s an extreme example from Murphy & Middaugh: