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Gravestone of Naomi Wise

This mental detour led me to contemplating both the enduring power of “Omie Wise” as song and symbol, and the unlikely course that a story from the North Carolina Piedmont in the early years of the 19^th century would take to this decidedly modernist auditorium in a major metropolis in the 21^st century. The leafy paths and fatal rivers of Randolph County, North Carolina seemed a “fair piece” away from this crowd of listeners sitting a block or so east of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. What were my fellow audience members hearing in this? What about what they were hearing actually connected to Naomi Wise’s murder? What about what they were hearing connected them to familiar folk songs?

I subscribe to Louis Armstrong’s adage that “all music is folk music,” but this work felt more about the tradition than of it, more inspired by, and less a new arrangement of old songs. The excerpting of the songs from familiar contexts, and the dissected and recomposed arrangements lent a kind of anthropological cast to the performance. I’m accustomed to doing that in writing, but it is a different experience in listening. Another way of saying this is that Murder Ballades relies much more strongly on the performer-audience dynamic than folk song would. Because it’s instrumental, the listener participates in the underlying story abstractly. We gaze at the stories from outside more than inhabiting the voices within the song.

Classical music and chamber music are outside my normal ambit, but I was intrigued enough by what I had experienced to want to dig in further, to see if I could find “Omie.” From the reviews I read, I learned that Dessner’s work alludes to and is in the tradition of Philip Glass. For my own part, the opening moments of “Omie Wise,” and some elements of one or two of the later pieces briefly invoke Aaron Copland, as though presenting a darkly Gothic late summer counterpart to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.”

Listening to Filament a few times, I began to identify what kept me on edge in the performance, especially as I listened for the core tunes underneath the portions of the work which Dessner  based on particular, well-known songs – “Omie Wise,” “Young Emily,” and “Pretty Polly.” In the live performance, I kept trying to turn the recurring melodic theme into “Omie,” and couldn’t. Listening to it again on the recording, I kept hearing “Little Maggie” (YouTube) I asked Pat what he heard. Although he heard some traces of “Omie,” he primarily heard “Little Willie” (YouTube) similar to the “Little Maggie” tune I heard. Pat supposed that Dessner was drawing several strands of American folk melody together in composing the piece, or had found varieties of “Omie” tunes overlapping with other songs.

I asked my friend Julia, a classically-trained musician, what she heard. As she’s also quite familiar with “Omie Wise,” I was hopeful that she could help me find the hidden traces of “Omie” melody. She noted right away that Dessner’s piece is in 3/4 time and in a minor key, as opposed to the 4/4 major key of “Omie Wise.” With some of these tools in mind, I am picking up more of the source tune as I listen now, more traces of “Omie.”

Down in the Willow Garden

“Tears for Pretty Polly,” the last song in the recording, and the penultimate one in the performance, left me agitated—all stirred up, without feeling a full resolution to the piece. “Tears” brings me no catharsis. The revised version presented in the concert, however, included a performance of “Down in the Willow Garden,” featuring eighth blackbird’s special guest Will Oldham, also known as “Bonnie Prince Billy.” This song is a personal favorite of mine, and was presented in a more easily recognizable arrangement than the earlier tunes drawn from real murder ballads. The arrangement paired blackbird’s excellent musicianship with Oldham’s convincing ballad singing, and provided the first words of the evening. The return to lyrical music ameliorated the edginess I felt after the end of the instrumental pieces.

I found redemption in Murder Ballades in the second verse of “Down in the Willow Garden,” when Oldham yielded the lead to eighth blackbird’s flutist, Nathalie Joachim, who sang with exquisite beauty the brutal words of that song’s second verse. “I drew a saber through her, which was a bloody knife. I threw her in the river, which was an awful sight.” Putting that portion of the song in her voice responded for me somehow to my earlier pondering of the unlikely trajectory of the story of “Omie Wise.” The combination of singer and her violent material was richly evocative, and a freshly revelatory resolution for me of the evening’s theme.

eighth blackbird: Michael Maccaferri, Yvonne Lam, Lisa Kaplan, Nathalie Joachim, Matthew Duvall, Nicholas Photinos (promotional photo, source: Facebook)

Partly through the semi-fictional depiction of Naomi Wise in Anna Domino’s written contribution to The Rose and the Briar, and partly through the way in which the “Omie” character has moved from bad example to a sympathetic character, I’m inclined to see her as vulnerable, and undeserving of several of the blows life had dealt her, especially the last. Early characterizations of her in the song, and even Harry Smith’s characterization of the story in the mock headlines of his Anthology of American Folk Music, portray her as greedy or scheming to get above her station.

Over the course of the ensuing centuries “Omie” has come to be a rather mutable symbol. As with all good stories, a vehicle for understanding our age as much as hers. Her story has been adapted in a variety of ways, from inspiring short films to providing the template for a ballad about the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson. The real Naomi Wise was a young, single mother of two when she was killed in her late teens by John Lewis. Her vulnerability, economic and otherwise, shouldn’t be understated. Joachim’s performance of that second verse of “Down in the Willow Garden” responded symbolically for me to that vulnerability, and the unfairness of Wise’s lot in life and cause of death. The performance did not afford absolution for crimes against Omie, but rather turned the collective moral indictment emerging from that awful tragedy into a human, empathetic, resonant, and accessible lesson. These stories can’t be dismissed or pushed away in their import. They carry a human face and sing to us with power, beauty, and often courage, from the depths of the singer’s spirit and our own.