Elvis Presley, 1970

In considering Chris Smither’s song “Every Mother’s Son” in preparation for this week’s first post, I kept being drawn to the contrast between it and Elvis Presley’s blockbuster “In the Ghetto.”  The two songs appeared within three or four years of each other, both being a little over 40 years old now, and both present musical meditations about the persistence of violence and the factors that make a criminal.

“In the Ghetto” has been performed by more than enough artists to get it its own week at the blog, however peculiar it might be compared to our normal fare.  It is not a murder ballad, properly speaking, but it is a song where a young, nameless man meets a violent end.  Although he is not the murderer, the song not so subtly suggests that the rest of us are, if only in a highly distanced, systemic, and impersonal way.  It’s that subtle suggestion, that distance, and that impersonal quality that are probably sources of the song’s success and elements that can make the song’s message problematic.

Mac Davis

Written by Mac Davis, “In the Ghetto” was a clear departure for Presley, representing much more of a “message song” than he had previously put forth.  But, it became Presley’s first #1 hit in about four years, so perhaps a brand adjustment was in order.  Despite, or perhaps because of, “The King’s” stature, he wasn’t entirely on the same wavelength as much of what was going on musically in the broader culture around him in the late 60s. 

I was a huge Elvis Presley fan when I was about seven or eight years old.  I think I heard “In the Ghetto” on my treasured LP copy of From Elvis in Memphis.  The song remains on the guilty pleasure list to this day. My guilt is at least somewhat ameliorated by the fact that “In the Ghetto” was the first single for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  We have an as yet unwritten rule at Murder Ballad Monday that if Cave has performed it, we can talk about it here.  If he’s done it, it must have some relationship to a murder ballad. Right?

As I mentioned above, the reason I want to discuss “In the Ghetto” this week is because of its contrast with “Every Mother’s Son.”  Where Smither’s song is immersed in theology, psychology, and moral anthropology, depending on how you read it, “In the Ghetto” provides a more socio-economic or political account of the factors that drive people (young men, mostly) to desperation and violence; that the young man in this song is a thief and the one who dies, rather than a murderer himself, is beside the point.  

This social commentary approach is a double-edged sword.  While it raises awareness of the challenges faced by people trapped within islands of urban poverty, it also subtly isolates those problems there–they are huge and unsolvable, distant, and the inner city appears as an inescapable trap of despair and hopelessness.  None of these things are the whole truth.  “In the Ghetto” risks both raising consciousness and salving conscience simultaneously; as though one can address the problems it discusses just by liking the song enough.  Slacktivism before slacktivism was cool.

There but for the grace of the Colonel

It is, however, a hit; a very catchy song. Let’s get to the song and the back story. Here’s an early 1970s performance:



Lyrics  (You can find a Spotify playlist at the end of the post that includes several of Presley’s performances of the song.)

Mac Davis tells the story of the song’s origin as part of an extensive interview here.  The section on this song begins about three quarters of the way down the page, and is worth the read.  It discusses the risk Presley took in performing “In the Ghetto” and, among other things, explains that the term “ghetto” had only recently been applied to neighborhoods of urban poverty and de facto residential segregation in the United States, having previously been used only to refer ghettos established by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  Davis notes that he had been trying to get at a song behind the idea of a “vicious circle” of poverty, crime, and violence for a while, but was having trouble finding a rhyme for “circle.”  The idea, though, is there throughout the song; that such circumstances are self-perpetuating.  It’s not too hard to imagine the back-up singers intoning “vicious circle” with the same musicality as “in the ghetto.”  We should be careful not to buy too much into the idea that those two phrases are fully synonymous.

It’s also helpful to learn that Davis’s approach was informed by his empathy for a childhood playmate. Davis’s song, perhaps like “Every Mother’s Son,” also comes from a “there but for the grace of God” sentiment.  I’m not alone in supposing that this aspect of the song, a sense of identification of a young person born into poverty, was one of the reasons Presley was so interested in taking this on, and doing a “message song.”  If this sense of connection is not obvious in “In the Ghetto,” you can hear it more clearly still in Presley’s performance of Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”

Lyrics

In other words, regardless of how the song may have functioned in the minds of its audience, there’s reason to believe that “In the Ghetto” was a song that put Presley in mind that he had more in common with the angry young man than not.   

As a crowd gathers ’round…

“In the Ghetto” has attracted enough artists through the years to give us a range of compelling, or at least interesting, performances. We can start with Davis, the song’s originator:

As country follow-ups to Davis’s version, both Dolly Parton and Bobbie Gentry recorded versions of the song.  I will need the help of linguistics experts to parse what is going on with the concluding vowel sound in the word “ghetto” for each of them.  Not to be too flippant, but it does make me think that “ghetto” is really only a marginal improvement over “circle” as part of a refrain.

Susan Cadogan released a reggae version of the song on her 1976 release Hurt So Good:



As I mentioned above, “In the Ghetto” was the first single for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1984.  Here’s a music video performance from the time of that original release:



It’s an interesting look into the early career of Mr. Cave, whom we have discussed here at some length, including a week focused on his musical ties to Johnny Cash (beginning here).  I’ll leave it to the spelunkers among us to explain where this fits in his larger oeuvre, and perhaps why he reliably screws up the lyrics.  He fixes that problem in a more recent performance here.

Bobby “Blue” Bland released his own soulful version of “In the Ghetto” on his 1987 album First Class Blues.  Bland’s performance includes some improvised or at least additional lyrics to the end of the song that diminish “outside looking in” stance that the song can take.  His take is more solidarity than pity.  Bland is also included in the Spotify playlist below.



Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, recorded a re-mastered duet with her late father’s voice for a 2007 recording, raising money for the Presley Foundation.  The video composition is slightly troubling, and I’m wondering what kind of release the parents of the infants featured had to sign.



The song gets also gets a revival with the folks at American Idol, when Taylor Hicks performs it during one round of competition.  He oversouls it, if you ask me:

The song achieves international stature as well, with better and worse accuracy, no doubt joining Al Capone and Michael Jordan as an international symbol of the Windy City.  Here are Brolle and Sibel on Swedish TV.  The tone is somewhat ambiguous.  Brolle is generally on target, but the audience hand-claps and Sibel’s beatific expressions, as if nostalgic for those lovely days back in the ghetto, undercut the theme, with amusing results.




Eric Cartman also offers his own spirited and brief interpretation on South Park:

Among women’s voices, the performers who probably nail the song the best are Natalie Merchant and Tracy Chapman in the duet below.  The song’s moral tone is a good match for both artists.  It feels like less of an outlier relative to their other work than it is for some other performers, including Presley.

 

To wrap things up, here’s a short Spotify Playlist of some of the above performances and others:

If I had to single out one performance from this list for special mention, it would undoubtedly be the lullaby version created as part of an entire album of Elvis song lullabies.  Perhaps you can sing along as your young one falls asleep.

Do we simply turn our heads and look the other way?

“In the Ghetto” is a song with a lot of really attractive pop hooks.  I’m a sucker for its combination of verbal rhythm and rhyme, but it doesn’t grab me in the same way as “Every Mother’s Son” or a murder ballad might.  This may be peculiar to me.  I’m writing this post on a bitterly cold and bright Chicago morning (I know Davis was just writing a song, but Chicagoans and other Midwesterners know that the truly cold winter mornings are sunny.)  Chicago last year (2012) established itself as the murder capital of the United States, with over 500 murders.  Over 60 of them were murders of school-aged children and youth, with over 400 children and youth shot in that same period.  Sobering statistics, but ones that many Chicagoans know are largely isolated to identifiable sections of the city–avoidable for many, difficult to leave for many others.  A few of those shootings happened within a few blocks of my home, but the vast majority happened miles away.  It’s a rolling epidemic of tragedy happening one small episode at a time, and impossible to take in in both the breadth and depth of loss.  How does “In the Ghetto” attach some broader meaning to that immensely troubling civic reality for me?  It really doesn’t.  The song is catchy.  It has an important message at first look, but it doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t haunt, and it doesn’t inspire connection.  I have to look or listen somewhere else for something that might connect me with a deeper, more compelling understanding of what’s going on and my relation to it.

Jason Ankeny’s allmusic.com review of the song differs with my perspective on this point, although I agree with him on others.  He writes:

He’ll grow to be…

Elvis Presley never cut a more explicitly political record than 1969’s “In the Ghetto,” an empathetic and genuinely moving portrait of the vicious circle of life and death in the nation’s slums. Although the setting is urban Chicago and not rural Tupelo, MS, there’s no mistaking Elvis’ deep connection to the song’s tale of poverty and desperation — after all, it could have been his story had things worked out any differently. A hauntingly lovely, dirge-like ballad rooted in gospel, “In the Ghetto” is by no means a protest song, which is no doubt why it works; as the richest and most famous of all pop icons, Elvis was more distanced from the true inner workings of American life than any of his contemporaries, yet the song’s simple yet grimly poetic lyrics (written by a then-unknown Mac Davis) bear no trace of patronizing or pity, just wistful resignation. Accordingly, Elvis invests “In the Ghetto” with perhaps his most tender and compassionate vocal; even more than the record forces listeners to consider the world around them, it seems to reawaken something in the singer himself, taking him back to the life of hardship and hopelessness he left behind not so long ago.

In the Chicago Sun-Times article I quoted in the previous post, Chris Smither notes that the tone of his more recent production of “Every Mother’s Son” is “more resigned.”  This echoes the tone of “wistful resignation” that Ankeny describes.  Maybe “In the Ghetto” is less gripping because it’s not really a murder ballad, even in the broad sense we usually employ.  My main concern about the song is this tone of wistful resignation.  It has the capacity to isolate the problems it describes to a place that is somehow distant from the lives of most of its listeners and simultaneously a function of broad forces far beyond their control.  It’s a paradox perhaps, but the same effort that raises awareness also separates us from the problem.  Perhaps its implicit in the song assuming that its audience is out of the ghetto.  Only Bland’s version, among the ones I’ve found, dials this back and gives a sense not only of shared responsibility, but shared community as well.

Next up

If I can swing it, and to tell the truth at the moment it seems ambitious, my last post for the week will focus on Cain as a recurring and more or less explicit symbol in some interesting pieces of music from recent decades.  We’ve taken a look before at how the Cain theme pops up, mostly implicitly, in older balladry, but I’m interested in what valence the Cain figure has more recently.  “Every Mother’s Son” and “In the Ghetto” provide us with two different artistic statements on the roots of criminality generally and murder more specifically.  The story of the Bible’s first murderer will no doubt get us a little further.