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While the song’s clash of styles (pretty music/weird, ominous lyric) explains its surface tension, much of “Fatal Flower Garden’s” sense of menace and mystery is the result of cognitive dissonance based on exclusion – it comes not from the story but from what’s left out of it, and from the listener’s subsequent attempts to fill in those narrative gaps. We begin with a game of rainy day pitch-and-catch and end with a dying (or already dead?) boy dictating his final wishes (to whom – his killer?) for his parents and playmates. In between a witchy temptress flashes fruit and jewelry at the boy until he succumbs, followed by a sudden jump cut to his deathbed drama.

So, what gives?

The key to the confusion is the song’s origins in a centuries-old ballad and the peculiar process by which such songs mutated over time – acquiring and shedding verses, characters, and events as they passed between performers, according to the whims, designs, and mnemonic imperfections of each. During that process, something critical was excised from “Garden’s” narrative, leaving it without a center – specifically: a murder, a killer, and a motive.

Each can be recovered. The song’s historical source – the prosaic event that first inspired some anonymous songwriter to set it to music long ago – is known. One summer day in CE 1255 a nine-year-old English boy, Hugh of Lincoln, disappeared. Last seen at play with some neighbor children, his battered, bloodied corpse was later found at the bottom of a well. So, that’s our murder – a heinous child killing indeed. But who killed the boy and why? Here the record is equally clear (if no less reassuring): according to grim and sordid accounts preserved for posterity by contemporary medieval scribes, Hugh – a pure-hearted gentile boy (posthumously named a martyr and styled “Little Saint Hugh”) – was kidnapped and sadistically tortured to death in a Christ-defiling, sorcerous ritual … by evil Jews.

Sometimes lifting a stone reveals something foul and fetid underneath. Such blood libel tales – offensive and preposterous as they seem today – were not uncommon once, and in medieval times they sprung up with deadly regularity, like buboes spreading plague. This one in particular had legs, and in the end, tragically impacted history. Occurring after a flurry of deaths blamed on Jews in 12^th and 13^th century England, each followed by persecution, pogroms, and massacres, Hugh’s murder was quickly blamed on a Jewish landowner named Copin (or Koppin, or Jopin) who – under torture – not only confessed to killing the boy, but also claimed he died at the behest of an international cabal of Christian-hating Jews dedicated to necromancy and the kidnapping, torture, and ritual sacrifice (by crucifixion) of gentile children. In the madness and idiocy that followed, the man was tied to a horse and dragged cross-town to the gallows. Eighteen “co-conspirators” were also hanged. But the fallout from the hysteria was farther-reaching: it played a significant role in the decision to expel all Jews from England in 1290 (they would not return until 1655).

Whatever the true facts of Hugh’s death, the rest of his story (and that of our song) shifts here from the prosaic to the poetic. Presumably his tale was told and retold by bards and balladeers for centuries, and by the mid-1700s a Scots-English folk song called “Sir Hugh” (Child ballad 155) (“Sir” being a corruption of “Saint”) had taken definite form. At some point during this gestation, blame for the child’s death became centered not on Copin, a “Jew,” or “Jews,” but on “a Jew’s daughter” who beckons the boy after his ball breaks her window or lands in her yard. Child records fifteen versions of the song in the third volume of Ballads (1888/9) with (mostly) minor variations, but unlike “Fatal Flower Garden,” all but one (a curious Irish-American version wherein the killer isn’t “the Jew’s daughter” but “the Duke’s daughter”) describe the boy’s murder and its aftermath.

A typical version, first published in 1806 but probably much older, fills in the “facts” missing from “Fatal Flower Garden” in lurid detail:

She’s lead him in through ae dark door,
And sae has she thro nine;
She’s laid him on a dressing-table,
And stickit him like a swine.

And first came out the thick, thick blood,
And syne came out the thin,
And syne came out the bonny heart’s blood;
There was nae mair within.

(Child, Ballads, Vol. 3, p. 243)

The boy dies, his body is weighted down with lead and is callously tossed into a draw-well “fifty fathom deep.” A postscript found in most versions presents his funerary requests (“Bury the Bible at my feet, the testament at my head …”) as either his last words or a directive spoken by his spirit – usually to his mother – after death.

That this (seemingly) critical content should go missing in the song recorded by Nelstone’s Hawaiians is probably no great mystery. Even in admittedly less enlightened times (i.e., 1929) such vicious anti-Semitism, not to mention explicit gore, was unlikely to find a sympathetic audience for performers who presumably desired commercial success as much as the next rural musicians (and Nelson and Touchstone were savvy enough to “go Hawaiian” at the height of the style’s popularity). There is, in fact, no reason to assume the duo knew anything at all about the brutally racist legacy of the song, which they likely encountered and “collected,” A. P. Carter-style, from musicians they knew or met while traveling. By then, it may have already lost all references to blood libel and explicit violence (certainly, more than one earthy ballad, “Pretty Polly” for instance, was trimmed of its most provocative content soon after arriving in the straitlaced States).

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