Eileen, the band (Christine Stulik [l] and Becky Poole [r], photo by Logan Futej)

Prelude (or Preamble, take your pick)

“The murders of men tend not to alarm us because, on a certain level, we perceive men as voluntarily accepting risks by leaving the protective bubble of the community to go on hunter/gatherer missions.  If you are interjecting here that this perception is sexist and archaic….well, that’s right, it is.  Much of our social behavior is sexist and archaic.  When men are murdered, we tend to ‘think’…I shouldn’t say think because it isn’t really thought.  We tend to internalize that as ‘Somewhere out in the dangerous world, something happened to him.’ We don’t feel threatened by that, at least on the same level as if the crime occurred within our community.

“When a pretty young girl is murdered, we tend to internalize that as ‘somebody is after our women.’ Somebody has broken into our camp. Women feel threatened by that, and men challenged. We feel that it is our job to protect the women, and we react viscerally to any sense that we have failed to do this.”
                         –Bill James

Bill James offers this theory in his fascinating, horrifying, and frequently amusing study, Popular Crime:  Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (Scribner, 2011).  James’s book studies crime stories that become national sensations. What drives popular attention to some criminal cases and not others? James is not saying this sexist and archaic dynamic ought to be the case, but that it’s a reasonably good explanation of why it is.

The theory–at a higher level of abstraction, without the men and women bit–is that “popular crime stories are an expression of our impulse to draw a protective circle around ourselves.  The interest that we take in a crime is therefore proportional to the sense it creates that our sanctuary may have been violated.”  This “protective circle” dynamic, applied not to gender but to ethnicity or socio-economic status, plays a role in the differences between “Every Mother’s Son” and “In the Ghetto,” which we discussed a couple weeks ago.  It’s why the former might be more haunting, and why the latter’s story involves “other people” and not “us” (assuming we’re not the ones living in the ghetto).  

Returning to gender, the same “thinking” (to use the term loosely, as James does) about the popularity of crime stories has a prima facie resonance when it comes to murder ballads, whether or not those murder ballads come from true stories.  If there’s anything that the murder ballad tradition is known for, besides the murder and death, it’s that said murder and death happen disproportionately to women at the hands of men, and often men who purportedly love them.  We can point to exceptions such as “Frankie and Johnny” or “Stagger Lee” or “Young Edwin,” but many of the most popular murder ballads involve male on female violence.  If this is not the particular protective circle that gets violated, many of the exceptions will include some other kind of boundary transgression.  It is likely that the songs that are most affecting are the ones that allow singers and listeners to process the sense that the protective circle has been violated–whether your protective circle is sexist and archaic or not.

If anything, we’ve probably underrepresented the “body count by gender” imbalance in the tradition, just for the sake of variety, but it’s there.  From time to time we’ve taken a look at the extent to which murder ballads reinforce sexist standards rather than just represent them.  We’ve also seen, however, that within the contexts of the cultures in which these songs arose, they functioned as moral or practical warnings.  We’ve even seen that some songs, such as “Cold Rain and Snow” in the voices of The Be Good Tanyas or “Omie Wise” in the voices of The Lonesome Sisters, to give two examples, resonate in distinctive ways because of who is singing them–that women’s voices can make the songs still more effective.  We’ve also seen how a song like “Matty Groves” has resonances for both men and women, who presumably each find characters with whom they can identify.  

With this week’s posts, though, I invite you to join me in listening to some new artists who are advancing the tradition and transgressing boundaries in entirely different ways.  I think you’ll find the results quite interesting.

Eileen

Our Facebook page got a like from another Facebook page for “Eileen.”  Curious, I followed link to link until getting to their web site, and I heard this, and was blown away.  Here is “I’ll Lay You Down” by Eileen.

Now I’d prefer you to stay right where you are
As I go get in the car.
The circling birds will pick your brain
As I hear the humming of tar

I’ll lay you down on the sun-bleached rocks
Calm, limp like a deer. A hit and run
My love of all years. My love of all time
One twist my embrace took the pain from your face
And I saw who I loved before

The crabs and the gulls will baptize your brow
At the river my whispers are bells
Not sure they’ll come getcha from up above, this water is too cold for angels

I’ll lay you down on the sun-bleached rocks
Calm, limp like a deer. A hit and run
My love of all years. My love of all time
Swallows beg me to go, its getting so dark and mosquitos buzz in my ears

It was easier to leave you than I would’ve thought
Just walk away into the brush
You’re better off here and I’ll shed one tear
For each that you woulda shed for me.

To my ear, “I’ll Lay You Down” is both subtly innovative and subversively traditional.  You get a modern voice, with the song’s lyrics written entirely in an introspective first person.  This is not a third-person folk tale set to music. But the lyrics also delve into richer, ancient symbols, with the river flowing by as animals both witness the crime and hide the evidence.  Nature suffuses the gentle but murderous action within the song, and the judgment of heaven is invoked, if only obliquely. The accordion provides a kind of Scottish drone, and that’s not a theremin you’re hearing.  

It’s a saw.

Becky Poole

There’s an evocative bit of manipulation here.  We have a song that is a recognizable descendant of “Omie Wise” or “Banks of the Ohio,” but in a different voice and from a different perspective.  The women’s voices put us in mind of a new kind of protagonist, but we should note that there’s not a single explicit gender reference to protagonist or victim in the song.  (We’ll get to that more in the next post.)  There is sorrow, but little suggestion of remorse.

We’ve heard songs with women killing men before.  The usual modes for these are self-defense (e.g. Gillian Welch‘s “Caleb Meyer” or Rorey Carroll‘s “Head Hung“) or scorned woman (e.g. “Fair Ellender” or “Young Hunting“).  There is more modern tradition of revenge or anti-domestic abuse songs (e.g. “Cruel Willie,” The Dixie Chicks‘ “Goodbye Earl,” or Gretchen Peters‘s “Independence Day” [made famous by Martina McBride]).  A few months ago, we also listened to “Bold William Taylor,” an example of the Female Warrior ballad tradition.  There are any number of examples of folk music, old and new, presenting us with women as killers.  What Eileen is doing here, though, is a little bit different.  Unlike those songs, “I’ll Lay You Down” is neither a “success story” (as the Female Warrior ballads) nor is it a survival story, at least in any obvious way.  There’s a different notion of women’s agency here (if we accept the assumption for the time being that the song’s protagonist is female), and a compelling artistic exploration of many of the themes that have formed our own discussion.  I doubt Eileen is alone in doing this kind of work, but I’m impressed with the success of “I’ll Lay You Down.”

Eileen is a new band, and their growing repertoire consists of originals, which explore this reconfigured territory of female agency, and traditional murder ballads.  The latter may be played straight, or remade to let some victims be survivors, among other possible twists.  Eileen is “tampering with” and “disrupting” the murder ballad tradition, which sounds to me like a very good way to keep it alive.  We’re going to explore what’s going on in their songs this week in a two-part interview with Eileen, and see what this tampering is all about.  We’ll have some exclusive, MBM-only performances, and find out what’s ahead for the band, so come on back in a day or two.

Christine Stulik (on banjo) — Photo by Zach Abubeker