Introduction

We here at Murder Ballad Monday would love every week to bring you a fully researched ‘deep dive’ into a particular ballad, but time doesn’t always allow for that, given that we don’t make a penny from this work.  Honestly, I think we’re better for it.   Keeping it short and emotional even when we’d rather be long and intellectual is a worthy practice.  Forced balance is still balance.

Further, and by choice, this isn’t a blog about crime – we’re ultimately after music that gives mortality context.  Not every song that brings us face to face with “mysteries dark and vast” is about murder.  Sometimes they’re just about death, plain and simple.  We’ve decided to dedicate a portion of our posts in an occasional series to such songs.

This week though I’ve got some time, and I want to start our new endeavor with a song you’ll likely know as “Oh Death”, also known in a slightly different version by the name whence we derived the title for our series: “Conversation with Death“. They are closely related, so we’ll consider them as a song group (Roud #4933, if you want to get technical.) In it, no murder is committed; but the singer bargains with Death in the moment of his or her demise.  Some variants of the group imagine Death more abstractly, but hit hard in a slightly different way.  All of these performances are terrifying and liberating, each in its own manner.

Not surprisingly, the songs in the group function in key ways like a murder ballad.  The lyrics evoke horror in hopes of the listener’s changed behavior or resistance to temptation.  “Conversation with Death”, as surely as “Omie Wise“, is a warning to every woman, child, and man.  More deeply, Death is universal, personified or otherwise, however delivered.  And of course, our own mortality is entirely fascinating.  “Conversation with Death” certainly uses all three of these devices to dig some of the same ground as a typical traditional song in our genre of choice.

Unlike a traditional murder ballad though, the song group is explicitly religious. Being neither Christian nor a highly trained scholar of religious studies, I am unqualified to speak to the song’s context in that regard beyond the most obvious truths.  However, because of the song’s universality as a memento mori, it’s not necessary that I explore its specific religious content deeply. Theology is no bar to access here.  Only fear will cut us off from the core of this message.

So, be fearless and let’s listen to hear what we might.

“This very hour come, go with me…”

Vernon Dalhart cut the earliest known recording in 1928, using the title “Conversation with Death (by a Blind Girl)”.  Columbia released that track in 1930.  I can’t as yet find a recording though.  Two more recent versions are the ‘purest’ Anglo-American recordings I know and can play here.  Siblings Lloyd Chandler and Berzilla Chandler Wallin hailed from Madison County, North Carolina, one of the places where the Anglo-American ballad tradition was most robust and still persists.  Lloyd Chandler claimed to have written the song in 1916 when inspired by God and suffering on what he thought was his deathbed after a two week white lightning bender.  I’ll take up that debate briefly below, but it matters little for the moment. If these aren’t original lyrics by Chandler, we can still be reasonably sure that these performances (Wallin’s from 1963, released in 1964 and Chandler’s from 1965, released in 1975) meaningfully represent something of the original lyrics, as you’ll see when compared to other versions.  They are lengthy but make a good baseline, so I’ll include them in full.

Wallin’s version on YouTube

Oh what is this I cannot see
with icy hands take hold on me?
“Oh I am Death, that none can excel,
I open the door of Heaven and Hell.”

Now Death, oh Death how can it be
that I must come and go with thee?
Oh Death, oh Death, how can it be?
For I’m unprepared for Eternity.

“Yes, I’ve come for to get your soul,
leave your body and leave it cold,
to drop the flesh from off your frame;
the earth and worms both have their claim.”

Now Death, oh Death, if this be true,
please give me time to reason with you.
“From time to time you heard and saw
I’ll close your eyes and lock your jaw.

I’ll lock your jaws so you can’t talk.
I’ll fix your feet so you can’t walk.
I’ll dim your eyes so you can’t see.
This very hour come go with me.”

Now Death, oh Death, consider my age
and do not take me at this stage.
My wealth is all at your command
if you will move your icy hand.

“The old, the young, the rich, the poor,
they alike with me will have to go.
No age, no wealth, no silver, no gold,
nothing satisfies me but your poor soul.”

Now Death, oh Death, please let me see
if Christ has turned his back on me.
“When you were called and asked to bow,
you wouldn’t take heed and it’s too late now.”

Now Death, oh Death, please give me time
to fix my heart and change my mind.
“Your heart is fixed, your mind is bound.
I have the shackles to drag you down.”

Too late, too late, to all farewell,
My doom is fixed, I’m summoned to Hell,
As long as God in Heaven shall dwell
My soul, my soul shall scream in Hell.

My first exposure to this song was Chandler’s version on High Atmosphere. It was the lines that Death speaks about the body that most thoroughly disturbed me – and that’s obviously exactly what they’re supposed to do.  Flesh rotting from the bones, worms devouring it as it decays into the Earth, a jaw locked forever, feet that will never move again – good God, who wouldn’t be disturbed?  Despite the lines about Christ and the obvious religious intent of the song, it was so much more personal to me than all that.

Why so?  Some of my earliest memories are of visiting ‘grandaddy’s grave’ with my grandmother.  Though he was actually a later husband of hers and wasn’t my relative, I was too young to know and understand such things.  He’d died the year I was born and, as I was only three or four, it was all very intense for me because it was still so intense for my grandma.

I was raised free of formal religious teaching, though no one in my family was an atheist.  I must have asked what burial was like and received matter-of-fact answers, because soon I began to imagine myself entombed in a casket underground.  I developed quite a little existential crisis, which no doubt helped propel me to spend a good deal of time writing about murder ballads as an adult!  But here’s the point of it – without an ideology to explain either an afterlife or nothingness, I was stuck in that imagined casket.  To this day I remember that feeling of being ‘trapped in death’ viscerally.  It’s exactly the feeling those lines about the body in “Conversation with Death” evoked for me at first.

And I don’t think it’s just me!  Oh, I recognize that I come at the song from my own place of course.  For a committed Christian, it might be the later verses that send the greatest shivers down the spine.  But let’s not quibble – life is short!  I think we can agree that almost anyone is vulnerable to the horror these lyrics evoke.

The question it raises is obvious. “I see that Death is near – what can I do now?”  The religious answer is embedded in the song – bow to Christ and live right from now on.  But unlike dozens of other religious songs with the same message, this one works outside the pine box and crucifix.  Like we agreed, this song can get to anyone.  Immense compassion will arise when one truly feels what is revealed here, regardless of how one chooses to interpret it.  Or, immense fear will come if one is blind to the truth – and to me it’s not strictly a truth about Christ.

It brings to mind a story of Japan, set in the early 9th century.  A beautiful woman was both a member of the royal family and a devout and enlightened Buddhist.  Yet, everything she did during her life to spread the teachings of the Buddha was complicated by the lust of men, even monks, who could not see past her great physical beauty to understand the impermanence of things, a truth at the core of Buddha’s message.  When she died, her final wish was honored – her body was thrown into the street to rot and feed scavenging animals, thus showing in death the Buddha’s teaching that she was unable to get across in life.  (The detailed narrative is here.)

Check out the artistic depiction on the right of her final lesson, from Takehara Shunsen’s Picture Book of a Hundred Stories.  Does it not work in a manner similar to this song?  Crows or worms… what’s the difference?

This image is more grotesque, from the similar story of Onono Komachi.  Click at your own risk.

As I said, this is universal.  Memento mori.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

“Oh Death, consider my age…”

There is something to gain here from a quick discussion of the origins of this song, though we can leave the detailed debate to others.  It does matter, however, in considering other variants of the song group.

Lloyd Chandler’s descendants and their advocates claim that his story about composing the song in 1916 is true.  The Journal of Folklore Research in 2004 published a series of essays wherein two authors attempt to make that case.  I’ll include the abstract and hotlink to the three articles mentioned within so you might read them at your leisure on JSTOR if you wish.

“These three essays are about Lloyd Chandler (1896-1978), an itinerant Freewill Baptist preacher from Madison County, North Carolina, and the assertion that he authored “Conversation with Death” (better known by the title “O Death”) after receiving a God-sent vision in 1916. The notion of Chandler’s authorship has encountered great skepticism. The essays examine, from both insider and outsider perspectives, the reasons why people who knew Lloyd Chandler believe in his authorship while those who did not know him reject the notion out of hand. Barbara Chandler bases her argument that Chandler wrote the song on her personal knowledge of his life and character. Carl Lindahl presents the verbalized memories of Chandler’s family, friends, and fellow preachers to explain what the song meant to Chandler himself and how he played upon the elements of fear and pain implicit in the song to craft performances that listeners found unforgettable. Using a historic-geographic approach, Lindahl examines the “O Death” song-complex and argues that his intensive research has failed to find any version that shares as much as one full line with the Chandler text predating 1927, although previous folklorists traced the song to sixteenth-century British broadsides. In his afterword, Lindahl describes his relation to the family and his growing commitment to advocacy.“

I have no interest in significantly entering the debate.  However, the key issue Lindahl describes takes us right where I want to go next.  The problem he encounters in trying to prove Chandler’s descendants’ claim is that there exists a great deal of variety in performances of this song, much more so than one might expect from a song written in 1916.  There seem to be, in fact, as many variants of this song in the African-American tradition as among white folks.

Lindahl’s discussion of the various sources and their relationship is interesting. He can identify no primary source that proves an earlier date for the song than Chandler’s claim, and his speculation about such widespread variety is ultimately based on the well-documented fact that Chandler took this song on the road through the South for years as a travelling preacher, singing it for anyone who’d listen.  People, presumably finding it as compelling as do many today, took it from there and adapted it to fit their own communities and aesthetics, cross-pollinating as they went.

Perhaps he’s right, though it doesn’t matter here.  I rather want to spend the rest of the post hearing some of those variants!  You can decide for yourself about the debate, or just enjoy yourself and listen – or do the first when you’re done listening!

The standard theory which Lindhal disputes is that “Conversation with Death” was likely a product of the religious revivalism of the American South sometime in the 19th century, when both blacks and whites would have been exposed to the original song.  Scholars tend to see the prototype that inspired “Oh, Death” or its direct ancestor as being one imported from Britain and known in America, namely “Death and the Lady.”  As Lindhal points out, it has little in common lyrically with “Oh, Death”, but I think you’ll want to hear it anyway.

“Death and the Lady” – Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy (Spotify)     Lyrics to “Death and the Lady”

Obviously there is thematic resemblance, and the performance is lovely.  Consider on your own as you will as to whether or not it became the “O Death” we recognize.  Together instead let’s look now at two more of the direct Anglo-American variants to which we can link.

The best-known version today of course is the Grammy winning performance by Dr. Ralph Stanley from the Coen Brothers 2000 motion picture O Brother, Where Art Thou?.  It can’t truly qualify as ‘authentic’, but neither can we dismiss Stanley as simply an entertainer performing it for a movie.  His roots ran deep with this song and he sang it in the style of the Primitive Baptist Church he attended as a boy.  It’s bona fide, as was he.

“Oh Death” – Ralph Stanley on YouTube (live)   Lyrics for “Oh Death” – Ralph Stanley

Here we see some of that variation that complicates the ‘origins debate’.  Along with some similar or identical verses to Chandler’s, there are some clearly different lyrics including that well-recognized refrain – “Won’t you spare me over ’til another year?”.  Such elements are absent from the Madison County version and are clearly from another writer, but they are neither a creation of Hollywood nor Mr. Stanley’s.

Listen to Dock Boggs‘s version, recorded in 1963.

“Oh Death” – Dock Boggs on YouTube    Lyrics for “Oh Death” by Dock Boggs

Boggs includes those different elements, but you’ll hear below that he probably didn’t write them either.  According to the liner notes for Dock Boggs: His Folkways Years, he learned this song about 1930 from his brother-in-law.  We can’t know whether that version included the ‘non-Chandler’ elements, but there are other ways to go here.

“If I was a flower in my bloom…”

We must consider the song in the African-American tradition.  There is much to hear and know.

While some point to Charley Patton’s haunting track “Oh Death” as a relative, it seems to me to have nothing in common lyrically or musically with this song group.  However, there’s a different path we can travel to find clear relatives to our “Oh Death” and perhaps some hint of the source of that ‘other’ material as well.

I remember the mind-expanding moment when I first heard Bessie Jones singing “Oh Death” as if it were another Georgia sea island song from the days before Emancipation.  I pulled out my copy of High Atmosphere to compare them in amazement.  I had the later version from Put Your Hand on Your Hip and Let Your Backbone Slip, but listen for yourself to the version Alan Lomax recorded in 1960.

“Oh Death” – Bessie Jones on YouTube

For lyrics, and Alan Lomax’s musing about the song’s possible origin, see page 10 in these liner notes.

Here we find several elements in common with the Anglo-American versions above: “spare me over for another year”, “cold, icy hands”, fixed body parts, and the ‘age/stage’ plea.  Yet we also find lyrics and elements wholly other, and we hear an approach that is musically not rooted in fear alone.  This performance is not exactly celebratory, but neither is it solemn.  Indeed, in the later version I first heard, Jones is joined by others who sing and clap through the song.

And if we go back a few more years to 1953, we find a gospel version that leaves Earth behind and shouts into the clouds.  This variant by the Reverend Anderson Johnson (see also another biography here) is called “Death in the Morning”.  In this one, both a mother and her daughter bargain with Death for the latter’s life.  But friends, let me tell you – though the lyrics are brutal, this might be the happiest song about death you’ll ever hear.

“Death in the Morning” – Rev. Anderson Johnson on YouTube     Lyrics for “Death in the Morning”

I don’t know about you, but I think this one qualifies as the loveliest version of this song that I know.  I find it fascinating that the terror of meeting Death and the horror of this story can be so effectively contextualized in such uplifting music.  But, if you want Gospel but with a more somber tone, you can check out Marion Williams’s version from 1988.

Anderson was a Virginian and Jones a Georgian.  But do we see the song recorded ‘authentically’ elsewhere in the black South before the 1960’s?  Indeed, we find two examples on Folkways’ massive six volume Negro Folk Music of Alabama – “Death Have Mercy” by Rich Amerson on Volume IV recorded in 1955, and “Death is Awful” by Dock Reed and Vera Hall Ward on Volume V recorded in 1950.

Lyrics on page 6 of the original liner notes of Vol IV

Lyrics on page 6 of the original liner notes of Vol V (note, it is where page 3 should be)

Neither is particularly upbeat, but they do not inhabit the same Appalachian Baptist space as do performances like Stanley’s and Chandler’s.  There is a warmness, a loving compassion in the way the lines are delivered in both performances, at least to my ear.  And again we see that “spare me over” refrain side by side with elements unknown in the Anglo-American variants.   Of note in these two regarding the latter is the line about being a ‘flower in bloom, cut down too soon’.

Such a metaphor of course is universal and is likely found in some manner in every culture on Earth.  Yet it finds, with so much else, a unique and beautiful expression in this particular soil.

Requiescat in pace…

The versions of “Oh Death” presented here are representative, but not exhaustive.

With a wider sampling, Lindahl suggests that the African-American variants represent an older song, recognized by the ‘spare me over’ refrain.  He finds that it “occurs in at least eight African American texts recorded in places as diverse as Chicago and the Georgia Sea Islands.”

That song in some unknown form, Lindahl posits, mixed with Chandler’s version and formed new black variants such as those we hear above.  It simultaneously worked its way into white mountain versions of Chandler’s song as well.  I’m not sure, but like I said, I don’t have a horse in that race.  Whether you agree with Lindahl’s final conclusions or not, I suggest if you’re interested in a thorough accounting of what’s ‘out there’ for this song, read his work linked above.

Or, you could check out my Spotify playlist if you’re interested in hearing the many other more recent versions of the song.  It has truly become a post-modern experimental piece.  Check out this version with throat singing, for example!

What we heard here though for me is about something other than the song’s history or origins.  It’s not about where it’s been or where it’s going.

It’s about how I accept being in that coffin I imagined when I was a child.  How do I lay there without fear?  I can’t articulate the answer well.

I will say this.  For me, it’s not about the religious message in this song.  It’s about the music itself, black and white; it’s about the sounds of the voices and the instruments in the here and now.  Somehow, in that place, I can reach out for old Death’s bony hand and give it a shake, even knowing that soon enough he’ll reveal the whole of my toothy smile.

Thanks for listening and reading this week folks!