<<<Back to page 1

Leavening the production with comic elements drew the darker songs into focus and boosted the more light-hearted ones. Many couples attending were holding each other, swaying to the music. The murder theme is evidently quite romantic. I kept listening for familiar ballads, and found only one in their version of “Edward.” (Read about the traditional version here.) I was also looking for the emotional linchpin of the performance, and found it in “Lullaby,” sung with a compelling, quiet intensity by “Mr. Tender.”

Overall, the the wake and the songs connect only loosely. Both are enjoyable, but have decidedly different emotional centers of gravity. The show needs the comic elements in order to entertain. The songs themselves include some numbers that capture a bawdier, rowdier vibe, but in the aggregate, they work you over along lines we have come to know. They have a gravitas that hits those inner, dark places. The wake left me entertained. The songs leave me troubled and transformed.

“Way-hey! Fiddle-aye-ay!”

American Murder Song presents what we might call steampunk murder balladry, an analog to speculative/science fiction. For those unfamiliar with steampunk, it envisions an alternate history where steam, rather than electricity, becomes society’s driving technological force, or where some other accident directed history along an alternate path. Technology in these invented worlds can have a more antique look, usually drawn from the 19th century.

AMS attendees in Kansas City (source: Facebook)

A similar alternate universe plays out musically in American Murder Song by way of melodic themes, arrangements, and instrumentation. This new mix invokes the traditional, but presents an overtly altered form of it. Technology doesn’t play a direct role here, but history and folklore within this re-imagined world has diverged from the one we know. Familiar story themes appear with new tunes, and traditional tunes get deployed in altered ways. Although many of the songs are ballads in the sense that they tell a story, few if any stick to a standard stanza form throughout.

The show signals this alternate world in part by minor key versions of patriotic tunes that bookend the performance, as with “Yankee Doodle” mentioned above. These new American murder songs construct an alternative mini-canon of murder balladry. They present many of the classic sub-genres and themes, but with more modern, and occasionally sinister twists, both musically and lyrically.

Zdunich and Hendelmen clearly know the tradition. If you’re looking for strict fidelity to it, though, you will be frustrated. If you instead entertain these works as speculative fiction–steampunk murder balladry–they have something real to offer in their imaginative capacity and emotional force.

The boundaries are permeable, however, between this imagined folk tradition and the real one. “Mr. Storm” sings “Edward,” which evokes the original ballad of that name, but with a novel melody and arrangement. In other places, traditional folk tunes form a brief background melody or a refrain, but the main melody and arrangement are new. Zdunich and Hendelman create their songs’ murderous characters through ballads that are more evocative than explicit. They tell only parts of the stories. Their contemporary arrangements join forces with a post-modern narrative style, with shifting perspectives and unreliable (and occasionally openly insane) narrators.

If “Edward” is our bridge into this alternate universe, other connections to traditional murder ballads are less explicit. “Unwed Henry” offers a new, beautiful (and twisted) riverside sweetheart murder ballad. It is “Banks of the Ohio” or “Knoxville Girl, with more explicit psychological torment. It is not, though, a version of “Love Henry.” “Sweet Rosalie” evokes Lizzie Borden, echoing the humorous flavor of the production number about her we discussed a few years ago. “The Year Without a Summer” undergirds its main melody with stormy-night sound effects and traditional shape note singing.  “Pretty Lavinia” peeks back into the real world, with a piece about an un-sung anti-heroine of the era. Lavinia Fisher may have been America’s first female serial killer. Tender and Storm give her the ballad she never had. You can view the video for “Pretty Lavinia” below.

American Murder Song‘s 1816 setting has the side effect of rendering the murder ballad tradition’s racial diversity rather invisible. Although we have an equivalent for “Omie Wise,” it’s less clear that we have a true “Bad Man Ballad” like “Stagolee” or the like. American Murder Song provides a meditation on the American experience, but it doesn’t interrogate America’s founding sin as thoroughly as it does Cain’s. I suspect the creators likely found they were unable to perform this kind of material authentically by themselves. It presents an opportunity for the expanded project, and one that their early video material suggests they will take up. It is certainly an essential part of the American murder ballad story.

Dawn, Providence, and The Reckoning

The first EP, Dawn, focuses on children as killers and victims, with “Johnny,” “Mary,” and Edward” occupying the center. The haunting “Lullaby” bids this childhood set goodnight with the story of a westward journey going horribly wrong.

N.B.: Recordings of the above songs, with lyrics, as well as many songs from the other EPs appear on American Murder Song’s YouTube channel.

Continue to page 3>>>