Chris Smither

I envisioned our December break as a chance for me to dip into some other interests and, perhaps, generate some new ideas for the blog through unrelated reading.  It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.  I pay attention to the news.

This week, I’m going to use Chris Smither‘s  “Every Mother’s Son” as an entry point back to the Cain theme that has popped up from time to time in our discussion.   Smither’s song is an evocative case study for thinking about ways songwriters can address violence and murder as persistent, intractable, and enduring elements of the human condition. 

Today, I’ll introduce “Every Mother’s Son.” In my next post, I’ll contrast it with a better-known song by a better-known artist.  I’ll finish the week with a long-deferred post on themes from Hebrew Scriptures popping up in folk and popular music. Last Winter, when I wrote a week of posts on Jesus and the murder ballad (starting here), I said I’d like to get back to pulling some murder ballad themes out of Hebrew Scriptures.  It didn’t fit in the week with Jesus songs.  I also thought that there really is only one core theme, from Genesis, that I could explore–Cain.  But, in today’s post I have found Job, by surprise.  More on that later.

“You’ve made your son Joseph a dangerous man”

“Every Mother’s Son” appears on Smither’s second album, Don’t it Drag On (1972, the clip below alleges 1971).  In four short verses, it tells the story of a mass shooter who goes on a rampage before being shot down.  Each verse ends with the refrain “This could happen to every mother’s son.”  I picked the song because that insight–that there is no substantive reason to think that we don’t have the potential for such monstrous acts ourselves–is an important one to reflect on.  The song urges us to consider whether and how we think that’s true, and what value that truth might have for how we live our lives and make our decisions, individually and collectively.  In digging into the song for this post, however, I found something I hadn’t noticed before.  I’m going to try to tell the stories of both that original theme and the subsequent “discovery” below.

Let’s start with the music and lyrics first.

I speak to you. I think you’ll
Understand. You know you’ve
Made your son Joseph
A dangerous man.
He’s gone to town, he’s bought himself a gun.
This could happen to every mother’s son.

Something to tell you I
Think you should know.
You think too fast and you
Love too slow, you know.
You needn’t feel you’re the only one.
This could happen to every mother’s son.


Smither recently re-released a version of “Every Mother’s Son” as the concluding (listed) track on his album, Hundred Dollar Valentine.  One of a few new arrangements of earlier material on the album, “Every Mother’s Son” here is slower, heavier sounding, and Smither drops the key.  Smither describes it as “much more resigned.”   (This tone of resignation is important to keep in mind as you identify the narrator of the song.)



Having jumped from 1972 to 2012, I want to jump back briefly to 1991.  After releasing two albums in the early 1970s, Smither didn’t release another until 1984.  A prolific second chapter of his recording career kicked off with his 1991 solo, live, acoustic album, Another Way to Find You.  Since then, he has released a new album every two or three years.  Another Way to Find You was the first recording of Smither’s I heard and contains my preferred version of “Every Mother’s Son.”

If you hadn’t noticed before, I’m a fan of stripped-down arrangements.  Pat mentioned last week that he preferred Smither’s live recording of “Duncan and Brady” to its studio counterpart.  Personal taste, perhaps, but I’m in the same camp here.  There’s something in the tone of this performance that makes it more resonant, perhaps that he feels more alone.  

“A song I wish would become irrelevant.“

Compared with much we’ve discussed in this blog, this song is incredibly spare in its storytelling.  Smither employs minimal characterization and minimal plot in four short verses, inviting the listener to fill in the gaps, as good songs do.  He presents us with one named character, one first-person narrator, and one implied addressee.  The narrator is speaking to the addressee now, but reports having spoken to Joseph before his rampage began.  Indeed, Joseph warned the narrator what was about to happen.  The fourth verse isn’t part of the story.  For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out its relationship to the rest of the song.  I now have at least a small lead, which I’ll get to below.

In a recent promotional piece in the Chicago Sun-Times, Smither tells Jeff Elbel about the origins of the song.

Photo by Devin Dobbins

“‘I can’t remember exactly what had happened when I wrote the song, whether it was in response to someone “going postal” or murdering people in a Burger King,’ Smither says, suggesting a sadly repetitious scenario. ‘The song gets more relevant every year….’

It’s an obvious premise of this blog that songs about murder and violence can provide us with the imaginative resources to cope with, among other things, murder and violence, however close those horrors may be to us.  I’ll say for my own part that “relevance” doesn’t strike me as the most fitting word for how “Every Mother’s Son” works, but it is a go-to song for me in the wake of the kinds of tragedies it narrates.  So, perhaps he has a point.

It’s the empathy.  It is at least the empathy implied by a straightforward, non-ironic reading of the line that concludes every stanza–“this could happen to every mother’s son.”  (Who, exactly, is saying this over and over again in the song?   To whom is he or she saying it?)  The sentiment is a variation on a “there but for fortune,” or “there but for the grace of God.”  It’s a recognition of the common humanity we share not only with the victims, but with the perpetrator.  The song promotes connection to, rather than distance from, events and the people who make them happen.  Despite Steven Pinker’s statistical analysis to the contrary, there are other arguments to suggest that the boundary between good guy and bad guy is altogether too easy to cross.  So, unfortunately, relevance will persist.

Outside the context of processing tragedies emotionally, “Every Mother’s Son” might feel overly pedantic in its repetition of that concluding line.  For me, however, in the wake of this kind of terrible news, it is right there in the moment.  It provides a context to keep the listener close to the story and open to understanding the motives, the desperation, and the full tragedy of everyone involved.

This is the theme I knew I wanted to explore when I started this post.  Now, on to the one that emerged as I wrote.

Where were you?

I have known this song for twenty years and only in editing this post two days before posting it have I figured out, at least for me, a plausible identity for the narrator and the nature of the conversation.  I just didn’t push the question very hard before now.  

It’s now so obvious to me as to be embarrassing, which is not to say there are not other plausible readings or illuminating ways to approach the song.  It’s not my intention to act as the students do in Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” and beat the lyrics with a hose to find out what they really mean.  I think I’ve figured out at least one plausible and illuminating interpretation, but I’ll leave you, gentle reader/listener, to see what else you might find in support or contradiction of it.

I am chastened in this enterprise by having spent much of the last year reading song interpretations (elsewhere, of course) that I have found implausible, risible, or both.  We know that the best songs happen in the gaps between what is said and what is imagined, and they contain that all-important “inherent instability in meaning.” So, I’ll do my best to remain hermeneutically conservative, but propose a possible reading of this song that breaks some new ground for me in how murder ballads may interpret violence and find meaning.  I’ll acknowledge up front that a good bit of this is where I fill in the gaps.

Smither’s narrative device in “Every Mother’s Son” is like the one A.B. Yehoshua uses in his novel, Mr. Mani, in telling a story using only one side of a dialogue.  We must infer the other side.  Distinct from Mr. Mani, we have to figure out who both parties to this one-sided conversation are.  In the interpretation of the song I’m proposing, Smither creates a narrator who is simultaneously divine and unreliable.  The “I” speaking is the voice of God, or perhaps a devastated mother’s version thereof.  “God” is attempting, and not entirely succeeding, to explain what has just happened.  “God” has clearly also been speaking to Joseph, and “God” adds that fourth, non-narrative verse.  Is it consolation? Is it an admonition? Is it a moral?  Whatever it is, we’re still wondering what “God” said when “God” was speaking to Joseph as things were getting out of hand.

Elohim Creating Adam from William Blake’s illustrations of The Book of Job.

Rather than being an anthropological reflection on the human condition, about how violence is present within each of us, this song can also be seen as the start of a musical theodicy–a theological account of human suffering and the presence of evil within and among us.  In this case, it is a theological reckoning on a very particular kind of suffering, stemming from a very particular kind of event.  It is a mournful argument with God about the how and why of this kind of tragedy.  It is a fan fiction sequel to the Book of Job.  

Perhaps this reading ultimately makes the same point as the first one.  The song urges us to consider not only how a perpetrator might not be so different from us.  We also must come to terms with what that person has done and why; what responsibility we may have had to him or her; and ultimately how such apparently senseless actions are possible within a world of meaning and value.  In this sense, we can tie “Every Mother’s Son” to other murder ballads we’ve discussed.  It too exercises a particular kind of cathartic function, processing of guilt, responsibility, and kinship with all the people involved. 

We’ve covered some of this ground recently in Shaleane’s discussion of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.”  There, Springsteen appears to maintain with Charlie Starkweather, that there is “just meanness in this world.”  Springsteen and Starkweather give us a nihilistic vision in many respects.  Other reviewers have described “Every Mother’s Son” as a tale of nihilism.  Perhaps it is, directly or in relief; for Joseph or for us.  Whether it is or not is up to you to decide.  There’s a plausible case, though, that one way the four verses of “Every Mother’s Son” hang together is as the story one person’s struggle to hold on to meaning against the incomprehensible through a direct conversation with his or her idea of the source of that meaning.

Next up

In the next post, I’ll discuss a contrasting approach to the persistence of criminal acts and another song that speculates musically about why bad things happen to good people, or, more specifically, what makes people bad or drives them to become so.  

Coda

Peter Mulvey (photo by Jonathan Ryder)

Peter Mulvey picked up Smither’s “Every Mother’s Son,” performing it on his 1997 album Deep Blue.  You can hear it on Spotify through the link below.  Mulvey’s steel guitar puts more lightness into the song’s presentation than any of the Smither versions.  It’s not leaden or as entirely lonely as Smither’s Another Way to Find You version, but his vocal delivery captures the spirit of the song.