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“He tells them tales he won’t tell me…”

Folkways released a newer version of Kazee’s “Butcher Boy” in 1958 on the album Buell Kazee Sings and Plays, after his ‘rediscovery.’  Before that performance, by way of telling an embarrassing story about his recording session thirty years earlier, Kazee – a native of Magoffin County in eastern Kentucky, reveals some useful information.

Transcription of Buell Kazee’s spoken introduction to “Butcher’s Boy” – 1958

Provenance is not the point of this post, and with this ballad particularly we could lose the forest for such trees.  I’ll cover the basics in a post-script below.  For now, it’s important to realize that even in Britain this song was a later re-purposing of earlier ballad verses.  It’s always been dynamic.  That jibes with a couple of things worth mentioning in Kazee’s introduction.

First, he posits that the substitution of “railroad boy” in America for the English “butcher’s boy” is a function of the ‘romantic’ image of the iron horse in the Appalachian imagination.  I’m no expert, but I’ll take Kazee at his word.  The sentiment rings true with a personal story I’ll tell below when we get into the hardest part of all this – the young woman’s suicide.

Cover photo for June Appal’s 1978 release – Buell Kazee – JA009

On that point, he also reveals that he heard the ballad from his older sister – enough for it to have been an important influence.  Kazee, as a man, sang the ballad with sympathetic emotion.  He used his formal vocal training – atypical of a mountaineer — to evoke this song for audiences in an electric world both between and after the great wars.  Yet, it’s no stretch to speculate that the power he later generated on record first struck his young ears in a woman’s voice, with lyrics crafted before phonographs.  As he points out in the liner notes to Buell Kazee Sings and Plays …

“There were six of us children, four boys and two girls, and we all sang around the fireside and in the old country church…  Most of our singing was religious and of traditional ballads…  In our home mother sang such ballads as “Barbary Allen,” “Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender” or “The Brown Girl…”  The dances at our home often got mother into trouble at the church.  The daughters at our house were the oldest of the children, and boys came there on the least suggestion…”

“He found her hanging from a rope …”

Collectors found this ballad through much of the western Anglophone world.  A simple review of the playlist in the post script below shows it as common in both men’s and women’s voices.  No doubt, that’s been true for the life of the ballad.  It can take on different tones depending on who’s singing it and why.   This may seem a pedestrian observation, but sometimes the obvious is exactly where we need to focus.

For example, though he was a Baptist minister most of his life, Buell Kazee performed the song without any of the finger-wagging we hear in some versions.  This likely reflects his source.  We also heard the song without moralizing and in a woman’s voice from Jean Ritchie.  In the liner notes for her 1962 album Precious Memories, she states that she learned it from banjo player Lee Sexton, a contemporary who grew up in Letcher County quite near her home in Perry County, Kentucky – roughly 70 miles by road south of Kazee’s home.

It seems then this is a version born in eastern Kentucky.  It’s not the only strain of the ballad found in Appalachia, or even Kentucky.  (Listen to Roscoe Holcomb’s “In London City” for example.)  To my ear though, the Kazee/Ritchie variant is the most powerful.  The girl is not “silly” or “foolish” and easily led astray by a selfish boy as in some versions.  Neither is she simply too poor for him, as in others.  Instead, she’s human and desperate; the lyrics describe a wholly real situation and elicit our sympathy, and more.

Consider this well known and beautifully performed Irish version for contrast.  (You can also hear a traditional version of this in a woman’s voice from Tommy Makem’s mother, Sarah, if you prefer.)

Lyrics for “The Butcher Boy” by The Clancy Brothers w/ Tommy Makem

Unlike the Kazee/Ritchie versions, this one makes her loss of virginity and her pregnancy explicit.  Yet, in most other ways, it feels less real to me.  She chides herself for being led astray, and calls the butcher boy “Willie dear” as she writes her final letter, dropping tears with every line.  As well, it seems Willie discovers her body instead of her father.  Taken together we can see that such elements make it a morality tale.  It’s not unsympathetic, per se, but it’s clearly didactic.  ‘Look at this pitiful boy and girl and take heed.  This is what might happen to you if you give in to temptation and sin.’

Our east Kentucky version may be less explicit, but abandonment in pregnancy is still the obvious explanation for the young woman’s despair.  There is no dithering about with cliche laments.  It gets straight to the point.  This girl is in terrible place.  Despite the fact that she confides in her mother and receives no rebuke, and that her father clearly cares deeply about her well-being, she sees no hope.  Like the real Omie Wise, this fictional girl is pregnant in a larger world that will judge her as a sinful and fallen.  She is desperate and she acts.  Yet, as in the ballad “Omie Wise,” this girl is not judged.  We suffer with her.  Is it any surprise that the same hard-pressed mountain people who turned Omie’s tragic murder into high art could so humanize this British morality tale?

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