Last week, Pat asked why we keep pushing the murder ballad for meaning and truth, asking what we need to know that compels us to keep plumbing the depths of these songs?
But sometimes, it’s not what we don’t know but the weight of what we do know that brings us to a song, and keeps us coming back over and over. Such is the case (for me anyway and I’ll get to why later this week), with Neko Case’s “Deep Red Bells”:
“Deep Red Bells,” Neko Case
With this lovely song, Case introduces us to a pointedly unlovely but important sub-genre of the murder ballad: the ballad about the serial killer. (While Hollis Brown may have killed seven people, he doesn’t fit into the category at all.) I’ll post the lyrics in full as most sites get them a bit wrong and because we’ll be looking at them closely this week:
He led you to this hiding place
His lightning threats spun silver tongues
The red bells beckon you to ride
A hand print on the driver’s side
It looks a lot like engine oil
and tastes like being poor and small
And popsicles in the summer
Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
It always has to come this
The red bells ring this tragic hour
She lost sight of the overpass
But daylight won’t remember that
When speckled fronds raise round your bones
Who took the time to fold your clothes
and shook the Valley of the Shadow?Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
Deep red bells, deep as I have been doneWhere does this mean world cast its cold eye?
Who’s left to suffer long about you?
Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag,
Past empty lots and early graves?
All those like you who lost their way
Murdered on the interstate
While the red bells rang like thunder.Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
Deep red bells, deep as I have been done
Case wrote this song about her memories of growing up as a young girl in Seattle while Gary Ridgway, also known as The Green River Killer, was actively killing young girls and women in the area. In the end, Ridgway confessed to killing over 90 girls and women, and was convicted of killing 48. The bodies were found in clusters at various sites along the highway that also paralleled the river in parts. Some were found in or near the river, while most were found, posed and unburied, in wooded areas, hidden near large physical objects — trees, hills, clumps of fallen logs, overpasses and guardrails — that were visible from a distance. These markers allowed Ridgway to return to the sites over and over and to keep watch to determine whether the bodies had been discovered. (One can read all the very gruesome details officially collected here, if so inclined and unfamiliar with the case.)
Neko Case performing at Musicfest NW Music Festival 2013. Photo by KParPhoto.
What is it like to grow up in the shadow of such a killer, knowing that the human world around you is host to a monstrous man who murders people as a pathological, compulsive hobby — people who are, in large part, just like you? (Although all of Ridgways victims were prostitutes, many of them without families or friends to report them missing, Case has said that, of course, as a young girl all she knew were their faces published in the paper once they were found — they were girls like her.) And what is it like to know that the natural world around you is host to this monster’s victims, who are waiting to be discovered, perhaps by you?
Case is a master songwriter and in the abstraction of “Deep Red Bells” she captures so much: the fear (on the part of victim and witness); the specificity of the murders; the perceived generality of the victims, and the sympathy for them and their generality; the shadowy world of the urban interstate highway and its bordering water ways and woodlands; and the threat of being murdered over and over: the first time by a single man and then by everyone else in their news, in their stories, and in their memories and songs. She also captures something deeply meaningful about the murder ballad genre, I think.
This week, we’ll follow Case as she walks up to the edge and peers down into a world that most of us will never know, and yet know all about because we’ve read all about it. “Deep Red Bells” will be our foothold, but we’ll also follow Case into the mind of a murderer as well as into the mindset of the murder ballad genre itself.
Related: we’ll explore just what Case means by the haunting phrase “deep red bells” — she means many things, I think — and why it matters to us here at Murder Ballad Monday. For now, a short parting word about the Redvein enkianthus, pictured above, which is native to Asia but now grows in the Pacifc Northwest. Also known as “Red Bells,” the woodsy shrub has hanging clusters of red, bell-shaped flowers that bloom vividly in spring but fade by June. In their wake, they leave a cluster of leaves that also hang at the end of the stem, turning brilliant shades of red and orange before falling to the ground in the fall. In late season, tiny fruits appear on the stem tips in the place of the flowers and leaves. These seeds are hard to see, but if spotted they are easy to recognize because when you break them open you can see that they have tiny wings. Like the song does (in my reading — Case has never said this), we’ll be coming back to this image.
