“Caleb Meyer,” by Julyan Davis (2014) (click link to see more of Davis’s work inspired by murder ballads)

Cautionary Tales

YouTube provides a plethora of amateur, semi-pro, and professional performances of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings‘s song “Caleb Meyer.” For a song that’s nearing 20 years old, it has moved into the folk music repertoire with force. Some performances are better than others, obviously, and in the aggregate the lot of them are apt to drive you nuts with poor sound recording and/or the deplorable manners of audience members. A fine, harmonically rich performance by the evocatively monikered Dusty Bottom Girls, for instance, is marred by obnoxious laughter and lots of cross-talk.

The song clearly evokes a great deal of enthusiasm from musicians, particularly female vocalists, who represent the broad majority of the song’s interpreters. We’ll survey some of the better ones in this post, and in the post to follow. One coffee house or bar performance that caught my attention was this performance in Cleveland by a group calling themselves the Black River Belles.

Relatively speaking, they rock it, due in no small part to the talent and intensity of the fiddle player. I bring their performance to your attention not because I want to lead you through every nook and cranny of homemade video recordings of the song, but because of what the lead singer says in her introduction. She says that “Caleb Meyer” is a “cautionary tale” that says, “don’t mess with women, or we’ll mess with you.”

Her interpretation is not entirely unreasonable. It’s also just an improvised introduction, so I don’t want to give it too much weight. To put “Caleb Meyer” in the broader murder ballad tradition, however, I want to propose an alternative reading. “Caleb Meyer” is not that kind of cautionary tale–about bad-ass mountain women with whom men should not mess. It is not an empowerment anthem–a murder ballad equivalent of “I Am Woman.” I say this not to pick a fight, but because refusing a more polemical interpretation of the song provides a better sense of its achievement as a work of art.

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch

Some people call “Caleb Meyer” a murder ballad. We will too. I’ve also seen people call it a “manslaughter ballad,” perhaps because they are overly persnickety about legal definitions. I’ve been there. As a species of murder ballad, though, I’m inclined to call “Caleb Meyer” a “survivor’s ballad.” I hope to show you why over the course of this post. We should fully introduce the song, though, before proceeding with that work.

Hell Among the Yearlings

“Caleb Meyer” appeared on Welch’s 1998 sophomore outing, Hell Among the Yearlings. I would wager that the song was written around the same time as the material she developed for her 1996 debut recording Revival, but must have fallen outside the vision for that album.

This YouTube video claims to be from a 1995 or 1996 performance at The Down Home in Johnson City, Tennessee. Welch seems pleased enough just to call “Caleb Meyer” a “killing song.”

Here’s a live performance from Sessions at West 54th Street from November 1997, where “Caleb Meyer” appears in the seventh minute, amid material from Revival. Skip ahead to 6:32.

Here’s the song as it appears on Hell Among the Yearlings:

Album version on YouTube here.

Lyrics

Just give me that Old Time Old Time

One hallmark of Welch and Rawlings’s achievement is how difficult it is to distinguish “Caleb Meyer” from the older mountain ballads that make up a good bit of the tradition we explore. Some people are fooled by it. Whether or not Alicia McGovern, who sings a rather haunting version below, knows who wrote it, the folks who posted her performance (at least of this writing) ascribe it to the public domain. Old as the hills and hollerin’ pines, it seems.

This traditional feel stems from choices the songwriters make with both the music and the lyrics. The arrangement incorporates some modal elements that hearken back to unaccompanied ballad singing, although doing so through Welch’s solid rhythm guitar and Rawlings’s uncanny and electrifying flatpicking. Johanna-Hypatia Cybeleia’s post on “Caleb Meyer” and its forbear “Long Black Veil” discusses how this works in their choice of chord voicings. She suggests that they may have benefited from some innovations in 20th century classical composition in doing so.

It also helps that everybody stayed out of the way of the two guitars and two vocals on this song, with no other production touches to yank it out of the earlier era we imagine it to come from. Unlike the other material where the artists or T Bone Burnett, the producer, injected some electric twang or percussion, this one is a stripped-down tune. Bare essentials.

David Rawlings

The lyrics also do a masterful job of inviting us to visit the Southern Appalachia of our collective imagination–where you know your neighbors, but still live in relative isolation from one another. The language fits the scene, and the inner logic of the story never really challenges our expectations until the sudden reversal of fortune at the end.

When Caleb Meyer assaults Nellie Kane, he does so only once he knows her husband and protector is not there, and his attack takes advantage of aspects of Nellie’s femininity–grabbing her by her hair and lying down across her dress to pin her down. The song has a couple opportunities to cast Nellie as a scrappy, self-reliant mountain woman that it either passes on or goes the other direction.

None of this is particularly revolutionary or overtly political ballad making. The innovation of the song lies merely in the more subtle choice of whose story it tells and how.

We can point to other kinds of murder ballads of women forced into violence in self-defense–with the fatal and fiery “Independence Day” or the light-hearted Calypso “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” for example. We have others where the women actively plot to defend themselves, like “Gunpowder and Lead,” or “Goodbye Earl.” Still others, with a humorous bent, where one woman takes revenge on behalf of others who’ve been wronged–“Cruel Willy.”

In the first few months of the blog, we looked at “Caleb Meyer” as a contrast to a more recent composition by Rorey Carroll, “Head Hung.” In Carroll’s song, a woman walking the streets alone at night is assaulted by a man, and kills him with the knife she had with her. Carroll’s intimation in the song is that her protagonist was somewhat spoiling for a fight.

The murder ballad duo, Eileen, usually pursues one of two different courses–one to change the old-time songs so the woman survives and the man dies, the other to develop contemporary murder ballads that present the woman as a different kind of actor in the story, usually perpetrator and not victim.

Welch and Rawlings presumably had all these choices available to them in crafting their own “killing song,” but opted for a different path. This tale has a different feel to it than those others, for a number of reasons. The most significant among them is that Nellie’s survival is a near thing, and within in the logic of the song, it is not her mountain mettle that proves decisive. It is divine intervention.

Gillian Welch

That’s right; even as a murder ballad, “Caleb Meyer” stands within the form of traditional southern piety that we hear in Welch and Rawlings’s other works, like “Orphan Girl,” “By the Mark,” and “Rock of Ages” (their song, not the hymn). Bill Baue argues that they take a deliberately ambiguous approach on the divine intervention question, allowing listeners to insert what they think is going on. The most important part to understand, however, is that Nellie’s narration of the events puts her prayer and her sharp-edged salvation from a bottle one right after another. We have a good sense of how she would explain things.

If the song is a cautionary tale, it makes far less sense to me to see it as one that teaches men to fear feisty women, or the possible fatal consequences of attempted rape. If it is a cautionary tale, it is one about the possibility of violence erupting at any time, particularly violence from men against women, and that even surviving this violence has lasting consequences. The scales are not balanced. Nellie is not empowered by her act that washes her in Caleb’s blood. She is saved, but not redeemed by it. As we learn in the chorus, she knows that she’ll be living with the consequences of her justifiable actions. Her repeated wish to dispel Caleb’s ghost has the ring of something she doesn’t expect to happen soon.

The main point, however, is that Welch and Rawlings succeed in giving us a very good story and do so without overtly grinding any moral or political axes. They achieve this, in part, by surrounding this one woman’s tale with nearly every trapping of authenticity and conventionality imaginable–giving us a new song that is instantly old, and one that will have legs for a good long while.

Rattlin’ chains

In the next post, we’ll give a listen to a variety of other interpreters of the song, and think again about the challenges of conveying the song with authenticity, particularly as that challenge can play out differently for women and men.

Before leaving this one, though, I should make sure to give you at least two more. The first is an outstanding performance of the song from the BBC in 2004. Welch and Rawlings clearly go all the way out there for the song, and bring it back home with force.

The second is one of the more recent recordings, from the duo’s performance in A Prairie Home Companion‘s 40th anniversary show this summer.

I’m inclined to think that “Caleb Meyer” will continue to haunt us for some time…and that’s a good thing.