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Coda – “Oh, when they heard that Louis was dead…”

In reading Phillip Ratcliffe’s book, cited above, I came across some rather odd passages. They have to do with the question of violence in John Hurt’s music, an obvious example of which is “Louis Collins.”

Many of the people familiar with John’s repertoire have expressed an interest in why such a peaceful man sang so many songs describing violent deeds. Of the thirteen sides he recorded in 1928, six contained violent imagery … However, the ratio of violent to nonviolent subjects in his songs is much lower when his complete repertoire is considered. This may be a reflection of a reduced interest in violence as he grew older— or perhaps the OKeh Recording Company influenced the selection of violent tunes?  Was he simply repeating the words of songs that he liked and had learned from other sources and not expressing anything personal? Or was there a psychological displacement of violent feelings into his songs?

I find the dilemma rather ridiculous.  Though Ratcliffe did his homework, the ‘interest’ he cites is not the concern of people who knew the man, just who know his music.  In all honesty, it really boils down to how someone who sounds like a loving grandfather could sing so wonderfully about murder.  That’s silly, if you ask me – totally disconnected from Hurt’s history and the context of traditional folkways.   He was a poor black farmer, and he wrote the song nearly a hundred years ago in the Jim Crow south! Do we think he never slaughtered an animal, or spanked a disobedient child?  Do we think he never endured abuse or insult by his fellow man, or saw his neighbors or family suffer the same?  Must one have a violent heart to sing of a violent world?  It’s the folk music equivalent of a ‘first world problem.’

Mississippi John Hurt Museum
photo by Matt Lancashire (public domain, source: Wikipedia)

Still, Ratcliffe wrestles intelligently with the question by considering multiple scholars’ perspectives on the blues itself.  That’s not silly.  Of course, if you’re a regular reader of our blog or a seasoned listener of the blues, you realize that though Ratcliffe is not being silly in this particular pursuit he might as well be citing Captain Obvious.   I don’t mean to be disrespectful, actually.  I think the following passage sums it up nicely.  Only the neophyte wouldn’t realize it, but even the elder can bear to hear it again.

David Evans presents an interesting synthesis of what the blues means to its performers, concluding that it represents an emotional state usually brought on by problems; as the Reverend Rubin Lacy put it, “it boils down to worry.”  The late Jerry Ricks, an African American musician and close friend of John’s, expressed a similar view to me but in a rather more straightforward way. He considered many blues lyrics to be an expression of suppressed anger at white domination, referring to the blues as “Fuck you music.”

This nevertheless leaves us with a wholly unsatisfactory answer to the original question, which is really about John Hurt the gentle man, not Mississippi John Hurt the black blues man.  I think if you just take him at face value with “Louis Collins” at least, what you hear is what you get – a peaceful song about violence.  Consider this, please.  We may not have much in the way of provenance, but we know the song isn’t about someone particularly close to Hurt.  It’s self-evidently not a morality play. And it lacks the detail of a strictly news-telling murder ballad.  So, it’s violent but it’s not a memorial, not a cautionary tale, and not the news; it must something else.  For my money, it’s one decent man singing in and to a violent world and looking for the angels to bring him some peace.  I’m sure Hurt didn’t think of it that way consciously when he composed it.  He just wrote a song.  But the muse is ever mysterious, and maybe angels carry guitars instead of harps.

Perhaps that’s what makes “Louis Collins” easy to cover, and to hear, today.  Though it has nothing to do with the politics of violence, in a deeper sense it is not at all out of place in our world.  We relate.  However, though I’ve loved the song for decades, I didn’t really start thinking about it this way until I heard a contemporary remake that doesn’t fit into our covers section.  This one is a work unto itself, folks!

Josh Ritter‘s “Folk Bloodbath,” from his 2010 album So Runs the World Away, is a mash-up of sorts.  The refrain and basic tune are directly lifted from “Louis Collins.”  The characters Louis Collins, Delia, Stagolee, and Billy Lyons all join in.  The motifs come from an even wider array of bad man and murder ballads.  Ritter himself said, in answer to an interviewer’s question about why he chose these characters for his song:

They’re the ones I’ve always liked. For example, Stackalee is in so many songs, and he’s always the bad guy. I thought it’d be fun to give him some justice and have Billy Lyons—the character he kills in hundreds of old folk songs—be the judge who sentences him.  The characters in those songs are so living and they have so much to give. From song to song, the characters end up with the same fate—but they get there in different ways depending on the version. For “Folk Bloodbath,” I just wanted to crash them all together.

One might expect it to be a mess of a song!  Indeed in watching different videos of him introduce the song on stage, Ritter often calls the song “a joke.”  But, he is a highly skilled songwriter and, as I learned a long time ago, you can never trust a folk musician.  Turning the homicidal content in this song ‘up to eleven’ produces something I would never call a joke, though neither is it anything like an amped-up exercise in hand-wringing about the horror of violence.

Hurt’s refrain – that’s the key I think.  And hearing Ritter’s song lets one understand it’s the key to open “Louis Collins” too.

Lyrics for “Folk Bloodbath”     –    Studio version of “Folk Bloodbath” (Spotify)

Even if we had a dozen primary sources, no one could truly know exactly what John Hurt felt or meant when he wrote “Louis Collins” a century ago.  But I wonder if Josh Ritter didn’t just stumble squarely right into it by accident anyway.  “Louis said to Delia, that’s the sad thing with life – there’s people always leaving just as other folks arrive.”   He caps the song with an assessment of the violent characters that perhaps fits our contemporary worldview better than it would have Hurt’s.  I don’t know, though – maybe it’s closer than we might think.  I guess each of us gets to figure this one out for ourselves.

And I’m looking over rooftops, and I’m hoping that it ain’t true
That the same God looks out for them, looks out for me and you
The angels laid them away…