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Refrain – “The storm is personal…”

My original intent was only to highlight Ballads of the Barefoot Mind.  But the murder ballad blogger in me couldn’t let go of the fascinating conversation Dan and I had regarding the genre itself, and really the deeper question (to which we always return in this blog) of “Why sing these violent songs?”  I had more questions, so I’ll close with the deepest part of that discussion.  Thanks for reading this week folks!

MBM: Your insights and observations about ‘inhabiting’ both killer and victim in murder ballads are exactly what we’ve found after three years of writing about it.  There’s more of course, but it is interesting that you use similar language as we have, suggesting that we’re orbiting the same sun when it comes to this stuff.  What fascinates me as well is that distance you mentioned, wherein you get to play the part without having it debase your character.  What about that dynamic is identical for you between the ballads and your visual and other art?  What is different?  What does a listener/viewer have to do with that, or have to gain from that, when being the receiving vessel of the music/art?  Must one be the singer/artist to experience all that, more or less as a function of the creative process; or is it all open to anyone, or something in between?

DD:  One of the exciting (to me) ideas in the air concerning “contemporary” art is that we’ve moved into what is called “post-conceptual” – as though the world, or at least the art world, was prepared to “unload” the art object from the demands of the millennials that every object must do something else, “multitask” or it isn’t a clever object… the murder ballad falls into this, it isn’t just a grim listen, it’s a cautionary tale – it’s “good for you.” What a timid way to approach art.

Pretty Polly – 2004, Dan Dutton – oil on canvas

There was an English teacher in the high school that I once reluctantly attended who asked me if I would come and sing some ballads for her class. I sang for 5 periods, just a few ballads – “Lord Thomas & Fair Ellender” and “Pretty Polly” are the two I remember, taking up the remainder of the class with questions and answers, going both directions. It went pretty well. The classes were attentive and interested, if a bit stifled by the context and the usual expectation of boredom. After the 5th class the teacher thanked me and said, “There is another class, if you’d like to sing for them. They are a bit rough.”

There were only a dozen students, clumped in small gang-ish cliques with a few solitaries on the edges. I could sense the dynamic by the seats they chose. I sang “Lord Thomas & Fair Ellender” for them and when I finished, a student who looked like he might have been a baseball player if there wasn’t something a bit unhinged about him jumped up out of his seat and said, “I love that song! I love violence!” Another student said, “You’re like Rage Against The Machine aren’t you?”  At that point, outside of a tough girl and her posse, still undecided, I knew that they were willing to give the music a chance. So I did “Pretty Polly,” which I personally feel may be America’s main contribution to the murder ballad genre, and then asked them some questions.

The first question I asked was “Why did he kill her?”  One of the students said, “Because she narced him out.” Another said, “Because she was a loose woman.” I asked them to define loose and got a list of sexual promiscuities. Then the girl dressed in black, sitting in the back corner by herself, spoke up and said, “Because she was a witch.” This was clearly spoken as a territorial warning to the rest of the class, but even though it was a bit of grandstanding, I was impressed by the idea. I would later find that a ballad scholar had written a whole book on this particular theory. The next question I prefaced by saying that as I was not a woman I could not speak about it, but I had heard that there were some women who were attracted to men who were violent toward them, and would the women in the class speak to that. The tough girl then volunteered that there were women who didn’t know any better cause that was the way they had been raised, and the girls in her posse nodded in assent. It may have been my imagination, but I had a feeling that those girls knew what they were talking about, and that they also knew there was a better way to live, and that they were going to try for it – for them I think that “Pretty Polly’s” message was “don’t be a victim.”  I think that this conversation was one of the most meaningful that I had on the ballads, and it had not a thing to do with the ancient heritage of the songs.

One of the things that strikes me concerning the murder ballad and distance is what a willful process that distancing is, even when it seems that the singer (or visual artist) is unconscious, or at least unfocused, on creating that illusion. One of the methods of distancing that can so easily escape notice, because it is a social construction that the performer has accepted before even starting to sing, is the created persona of the ballad singer. I can imagine protests that folk musicians are simply what they appear to be… but nothing could be further from the truth. Many, if not all, ballad singers present themselves in performance as a link to a vanished past. The murder ballad is thus mainly a relic, a curio, something you can have several examples of – and perhaps Francis Child & “ballad collecting” is the exemplar of the Victorian obsession with specimens and collections of specimens. I’ve never quite gotten over the shame of being a butterfly collector when I was a child, so I notice the impulse.

Many singers (as Jean certainly did) will preface the ballad with some explanation – a history of how they acquired it, or a synopsis – framing the ballad as an object from and of the past, usually a “golden age”. This is a very different approach from introducing a ballad with an expression like the teenager in the class… – “I love that song! I love violence!”

So perhaps the introduction that the ballad singer presents is actually “This is not my song. It is not my story.” This is the phenomenon that led me to ask myself, “Then why are you singing it?”

How Came That Blood? – 2004, Dan Dutton – ink and watercolor

I don’t believe that all musical expressions must be confessional, but the question is still there, and the singer should know the answer – or be honest and explain that they don’t know and are trying to figure it out. Otherwise what you have is a mindless reiteration of empty formulas. The presentation of a ballad by a performer to an audience is, I believe, most usually a calculated act. You can’t just start singing a long gory story song anytime, anywhere, in front of anyone. The ballad singer must know their audience, and be confident of their ability to manipulate the listener’s experience before they sing the first word. Everyone has to agree to play along or the form won’t work.

Usually the violent action in a murder ballad takes place in a single verse, often a single couplet. One reason for this is that violence happens in a special kind of time, a time which is willfully sped up, and this acceleration (I’m not talking about tempo here, but experience) is in unity with the aggression of the singer. Because it is the singer, really, who must stab the three babes with the little pen knife, and it is the masked presence of this aggression which will arouse emotion in the imagination of the listener. The singer who “emotes” pity for the babes had better be prepared to bring it on strong or the listener will hear only hypocrisy – or worse, a shallow silliness. That will not get you through the sound of the supernatural bell which calls the murdering mother to begin a series of animal metamorphoses in the hell of just desserts. The ballad singer who is attuned to the song feels the tightening of the moment of aggression, delayed by successive plant images, building to a moment of what seems inevitable – because it is.

Once you’ve leaned against the oak and broken that strongest and noblest of trees, the thorn, a monstrous tree that grows violence on every branch, stabbing the air, is the next step in the progression. Nature is violent, the sex was violent, the births are violent, violence has grown into a vortex in the soul of the Mother, which is, after all, the soul of the universe itself, a violent universe determined to penetrate every living thing with a violent action, a Mother that does not want to be a mother, a Mother who stabs out life and wipes the blood off on her shoe. Where is there left for the mother, or the singer, to go, but through the harrowing struggles of the wolf running from kill to kill, the fish which eats its own kind or is eaten? If this prose sounds a bit purple, just try turning the scene into a police report, with photographs, and see if that makes it any better!

Murder ballad singers do take a sort of joy in having a really violent ballad in their repertoire – Jean told me that she thought “Bo Lampkin” was the most violent, sticking the baby with an awl to draw its mother to unlock the door that the mason himself had designed to be unbreach-able, in revenge for not being paid for his work. The violence is more horrible by being more drawn out, distributed by narrative to maximize the horror.

Primary Cat Attack – 1999, Dan Dutton – oil and pigment on canvas, collection of 21C Museum

One of the things that I think is so wonderful about the ballads is how they have sustained a concept of a world which could be called brutalist, presented with compressed and even formulaic poetry, which at its best is a living real time experience of things almost
beyond human capacity to endure. For me they have allowed a conscious experience of a will to attack that finds its fullest freedom in imagination. Sharing that with a listener, or a room full, is an extremely intimate and revealing situation, and maybe that is why it works better for me to close my eyes, attune myself to the actions of the voices who speak in the ballad, and allow the violence to accelerate time in a realm where souls can be destroyed and remade with ease. A lot is being judged beyond how well you carry the tune.

That is what makes the ballads so compelling to me, and I think that is why they have survived as one of humanity’s great collaborative artworks, not because they tell of events that are past, but because they allow us direct access to the forces that shaped those events in the past, and that are still shaping them in our lives every day. Better to commit one compressed communion with a great symbolic act of cruelty than an endless series of petty cruelties, half-expressed and never confessed to.

Why do this? I think the reason is that the ballad may be the only site of contact with this tool, where aggression and violence are unleashed in controlled conditions; so that you can swallow a bit of it, the real thing, and just like an immunization you will return from the otherworld better able to cope with the violence and aggression around you.  Whether you are its target or swept into it by the inevitable changes matters not to the imagination. The imagination gets to the bottom of that conundrum – the storm IS personal, you need to have access to shelter.