This is the second post on “Maria Marten” and other songs inspired by the Red Barn Murder in Polstead, England in 1827. The first is here. The third is here.

It is time for my confession.  Don’t worry. It’s nowhere near as exciting as William Corder’s.

As I’ve been working through “Maria Marten” this week, I’ve been wondering why I’m bothering in the first place.  Sure, there’s an initial curiosity, spurred on by the comment of Richard Thompson, an artist whose opinion I respect.  Fundamentally, though, I’ve been trying to isolate two things.  First, what in the world is actually interesting about this song?  Second, why do I care?  The answers have proven more elusive than I first expected, but I think I have it figured out now.

I kept stumbling into certain obstacles of history, research, perspective, and nuance.  Variations of this song remain popular performed by English performers, but few elsewhere in the Anglophone world have adopted it.  Can I be confident about this? If so, why is it important? (Don’t worry, all of you who know of the notable exception.  I’ll get to it in the next post.)

I also recognize that my perspective is limited by what material I can find through internet research and hear through mostly professional recordings.  The professional research that I’ve found, though, corroborates my initial assessment.  I hope to provide some kind of useful summary of them here.

The song is neither fish nor fowl, neither modern nor ancient.  Most people today would consider it a folk song. We can easily trace it, though, to an early 19th century equivalent of Tin Pan Alley–the British broadside press.

Despite these challenges, I had to understand two things. First, why is this song more popular and enduring than many of its broadside brethren? Second, why, despite this relative popularity in England, has it stayed primarily English? Why has it not spread into a broader Anglophone folk music canon? No one theory gives us a decisive answer to either question.  We can see, however, several contributing forces that give us a plausible answer.

In the process, I realized that the underlying issue has a lot to do with how we understand “folk music” vs. “popular music,” and how those genres developed historically. It involves the concept of authenticity, or how we construct or invent authenticity. This is what is important about the song, and this is why I care about it.

Popular and enduring

What are the elements that made the song catch on in the first place? Why does it stand out in popular imagination and recollection from other songs of its genre and era?

1. Compelling Story: That by virtue of growing familiar with murder ballads we’ve come to see murder among young lovers as all too common shouldn’t blind us to the fact that it is a compelling story. Death is a good plot device. As we observed a few weeks ago, popular imagination places the murder of women in a different category than the murders of men. Such murders seem to affect us differently, drawing our attention, which is why the media often sensationalize them.

Additionally, we’ve noted many times the putative social utility of these songs as warnings, particularly to young women. See, for example, the quote from the London newspaper in the previous post.  Most versions of our song begin with something like “Come all ye thoughtless young men…”  Ostensibly, this is a warning to men not to go down this path and get themselves executed. The real warning is to young women.  Yes, it’s a variety of victim-blaming, but it may well have been a necessary expedient for all the reasons we’ve discussed relative to “Omie Wise,” or “The False Sir John,” etc.

Still, it was not the only such tale from those times. We know that other broadsheets and songs appeared telling similar tales.  The “Maria Marten” story also involved social class dynamics, as the tragedy of a gentleman farmer and a mole-catcher’s daughter. Their stations may not have been so widely disparate, perhaps, but class is a factor. It seemed to mitigate popular disapproval of Marten’s three out-of-wedlock pregnancies. That Marten’s body is not discovered for a year, and that Corder almost gets away with it helps as well. This factor is in turn buttressed by…

2. Supernatural elements: Marten’s step-mother’s dreams and the song’s allegations that Marten’s ghost haunts her probably set it above some of its contemporaries, and other songs developed by the broadsheet industry.

Some versions of the song evoke the supernatural, as in this atmospheric recording by Mick Harris and Martyn Bates. It’s long, but downright spooky.

3. Distribution by popular press: The musical account of the Red Barn Murder that we’re discussing is one of several competing songs written and distributed by profit-oriented writers and printers.  The song’s success benefited from aggressive marketing.

This is one element where the changes of the early modern era made a difference.  Obviously, these were not the early days of the printing press, but it was the winding down of the Georgian Era. The Industrial Revolution was nearing completion.  Large populations in urban centers like London–not terribly distant from Suffolk–or other concentrations of population in industrial centers created easy means of spreading the word and large audiences to read and listen.

Other popular portrayals of the story abetted this popularity. Theatrical melodramas like the Tod Slaughter film we viewed in the previous post were part of this multimedia phenomenon. Apart from the particular details of the story, the career of the “Maria Marten” tale is similar to that of “Frankie and Albert” or “Frankie and Johnny.” The latter, American tale transpired in an urban, underclass setting, popularized among the masses. We can attribute it to one author. It spawned a number of film adaptations. I know a French version of “Frankie and Johnny,” but don’t otherwise know its reach outside of the U.S. If it has such reach, it certainly has America’s dominance in global media culture in the 20th century, or at least Elvis Presley, to thank for it.

4. Familiar English folk tune: The ballad also holds on because it’s set to a variant of “Kingsfold” or “Dives and Lazarus,” which others might know more popularly as the tune for Van Morrison’s performance of “Star of the County Down” with the Chieftains (YouTube).  Martin Simpson (Spotify) and Nic Jones (Spotify) have performed “Dives and Lazarus” and the tune was also put to a particularly lovely classical setting in the 20th century by Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus'” (Spotify). It’s no surprise that a song with a recognizable English folk tune, also used for church hymns would continue to be in the minds of the singing and listening public (e.g. “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say” [Spotify]).

As I think about it, it might be the tune that gives the song its credibility as folk music. We will see below how scholars have challenged this credibility.

5. The Red Barn: The barn is an evocative image. We will focus on it in the next post.

Started English, Stayed English

What are the factors that kept the song at home, so to speak? I can think of a few.

1. Timing: At the time this song was written, English emigration to the United States had slowed to a bare trickle. Whatever popularity it may have enjoyed among the English, not many of them were making the trek over. By this time, many of the Scots and Border ballads had already come over at least among Piedmont and Appalachian back-country populations. Naomi Wise had been dead for over twenty years. The United States had its own regional murder ballad sources by this time. “Maria Marten” accomplishes little that “Omie Wise” doesn’t, other than making sure to catch and punish the murderer.

2. Supernatural elements: We’ve already discussed a few times (for instance, here) how American versions of old world ballads tended to strip away the supernatural. Maria Marten’s spectre would do little, I think, to recommend the song to American audiences of the mid 19th century.

3. Child looked down his nose at it: This is a crucial factor, and the one that makes the most difference in understanding how murder ballads “function” within society generally, and how they capture the musical imagination. It also demonstrates a distinction, which may only exist in the minds of Victorian folklorists, between “the folk” and “the masses.”

Tom Pettitt discusses “The Suffolk Tragedy, one strain of the Red Barn Murder songs, in a 2009 article. He delineates how “The Suffolk Tragedy” drew from broadside accounts of the trial, and how it was further winnowed by a kind of “ballad machine”; what he refers to as a “mem-oral” tradition. That is, he compares the source song as printed with how the song appeared in later field recordings. He includes a link to a performance by Freda Palmer on the article link above. I think it’s the same song Palmer performs on this recording:

Pettitt distinguishes “The Suffolk Tragedy” from “The Murder of Maria Marten,” although both originated from J. Catnatch broadsides. He argues that once “The Suffolk Tragedy” emerged in the public musical imagination, singers started introducing various, subtle ballad-making modifications, gradually drawing it closer to folk song in style and substance, and away from the broadside reportage model.

The very factor we mentioned above about how the broadside printing industry made the song so popular in its day also served to doom it as far as wider dissemination along other paths. To earlier generations of scholars, the broadside printing industry and its mass market associations tied these songs with the urban masses–as popular entertainment produced for them rather than a musical expression from within them. Ellen O’Brien, in her article, “‘The Most Beautiful Murder’: The Transgressive Aesthetics of Murder in Victorian Street Ballads.” discusses this dynamic with particular relation to Francis Child:

“Even Francis J. Child, England’s dedicated ballad collector who preserved rural ballads as ‘ancient national poetry,’ was not yet ready to identify English national folk poetry with the urban masses: ‘The vulgar ballads of our day, the “broadsides” which were printed in such huge numbers in England…belong to a different genus; they are products of a low kind of art, and most of them are, from a literary point of view, thoroughly despicable and worthless.'”  (Victorian Literature and Culture, 2000, p. 17)

O’Brien’s statement is misleading in some respects. (Child was American.) It is highly informative in others, though, illustrating how Child viewed the artistry and authenticity of such songs. Tom Pettitt also refers to Child’s aversion to the kind of “journalism in song” represented by the original “Suffolk Tragedy.” He conjectures that had Child encountered a more “mem-oral” tradition-driven performance like Freda Palmer’s, without knowledge of the source of the original, he might not have been so dismissive.

Child’s derision kept it out of his collection. While Child’s work was not the only influential source, it was certainly an influential source for American audiences. Furthermore, whether because it was relatively recent, relatively urban, or associated with the working class (rather than some idealized rural peasantry), or tied to popular melodrama, or even because of independent aesthetic criteria, I suspect Child wasn’t the only one looking down his nose at the song.

Canon fodder

Despite its popularity with “the folk,” or “the masses,” the “Maria Marten” songs’ origins in broadside musical journalism excluded it from the folk canon. Whether or not we consider it “folk music,” whatever that may mean precisely, is probably less important than the light such judgments shed on notions of the authenticity of musical sources. Must they be obscure, attributable to no particular artist or author? Must they be distant in time from us? Child, for one, was born a few years before the murders took place, and the story had gained popularity by the time he began his work. Must they lie shrouded by layers of revision wrought by nameless voices over generations? Must they be distant from urban centers? However bucolic Polstead may have been, it wasn’t far from “civilization.”

We might consider “Maria Marten” a folk song or a traditional murder ballad now, but that may be largely a function of subject matter, age, accumulated popularity, or its typical performance style. Scholars 150 years ago would have hotly contested such a genre designation.

In the next post, we’ll listen to one or two songs wherein this tale may have stowed away and made it to America, but at a different time, and perhaps for different reasons. Before going on, though, it’s well worth adding two more recent English interpretations of the song, from artists from the West Country and the Midlands.

First, here is Maddie Southorn‘s fine arrangement on her 2006 album The Pilgrim Soul.  I’m not certain about the instrumentation supporting her through most of the verses. I believe Janet Martin plays cello on this, and that Steve Lawrence accompanies on harpsichord.

And, Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman‘s performance on their 2003 album 2, provides another excellent recent version. Here, Roberts’s strong vocal performance dances over Lakeman’s guitar and some very basic percussion, with Roberts adding flute on the bridge.

Here’s a more recent live performance of the song by Roberts and Lakeman.

Next up

In the next post, we’ll head to the States. At least one more able interpreter will make the most of the artistic opportunity presented by that Red Barn. Thanks for reading.