Introduction

Ken started us last week on a new, short, and lighter path for a few posts – murder ballad comedy.  We learned the obvious from John Cleese – that indeed, dark humor can be good humor, and really has an advantage in being such.  The uncomfortable nature of the subject might be offensive to a few, but it adds energy to the laugh for most of us

But what if the discomfort we feel isn’t from the awkwardness of making light of death?  Are there times when most of us might rightfully refuse to be amused by such attempts at humor, even if we can accept that making fun of murder itself is ok?  I think by looking at the Pitney-Bowes advertisement at the top of this page, you’ll find an answer.  I’m pretty sure today’s featured song and the others offered for illustration will lead you to the same conclusion, though I expect it will hit you with more power, and maybe leave you asking more questions.

Before we get to it, I feel compelled to apologize to my fellow bloggers – I think what they had in mind with the whole series was something truly light.  I expect we’ll get back there – but not today.  My turn came up, and this is where my mind went; likely because we’ve been listening in my 8th grade classroom to some of the latter songs in this post as a way to begin to understand the impetus for the antebellum women’s rights movement.

Is that funny?  No, of course not.  However, several of the classic elements of humor are here in these songs and even quite well-done.  Yet such tools are mostly in the service of something we see today as coarse and vulgar.  Indeed, the jokes in these songs will, at least I hope, mostly misfire for you.  But they’ll allow us to uncover something in detail that we usually only view from a safe distance in this blog.  I think we’ve seen so far in this series that in dark murder ballad humor, as in murder ballads generally, there is a wide range of possibility.  Today, though, shows us that some of that range clearly reveals the ancient sin of misogyny.

Let me say up front that I’m not here to judge this music as being somehow worthless for its trespasses.  However, neither do I feel comfortable committing the odious sin of omission.  I won’t judge this music; indeed I love some of it – but I won’t ignore any of it.  You of course are completely free to ignore me, but I think this stuff matters.

So, this post isn’t about my pointing fingers and being offended, it’s just about being honest.

And, honestly, I ain’t laughing.

“Fertile Liza”

Let’s get right to it then.

Eddie Pennington plays his guitar with a mean Muhlenberg County thumbpicking style. No one with any musical sense can deny his virtuosity, or likely can help at least tapping feet to his rhythms.  We’ve heard him in the blog before, playing one of the featured tracks in the third post of our series on “Duncan and Brady.”

He was the winner of a 2001 NEA National Heritage Fellowship, and the biography that accompanies the declaration of that honor reveals that Pennington was also a county coroner and funeral director.  There’s no doubt then that his day job informed the way he delivers the lyrics on this recording of his brother’s song “Fertile Liza”, included on his outstanding album Walks the Strings and Even Sings from Smithsonian-Folkways.

Lyrics for “Fertile Liza” by Eddie Pennington

“Fertile Liza” by Eddie Pennington (YouTube)

Now, I know the jokes here are tongue-in-cheek, and I know that joking about murdering your wife isn’t even close to the same thing as seriously thinking about it.  I’m well aware that hyper-sensitivity to and disapproval of ‘offensive’ content are often the hallmarks of a closed mind, on whichever extreme of the political spectrum it dwells.  I’m a practitioner of a live and let live philosophy, and I don’t claim to have anything more than personal answers when it comes this stuff.  Even those are hard to come by!

But, personally, this just isn’t funny for me.  There’s no mystery about that insofar as I’m concerned.  I’ve known from the first time I heard it that the ‘clever’ word play that drives the song’s humor is over the line for me.  It’s not that I don’t understand or accept that we’re all ultimately food for worms.  I admit, in fact I celebrate, that death can be funny!

Like I said, Pennington’s non-musical career probably makes the joke funnier for him than it ever could for me.  I feel sure the song reflects infinitely more about that than it does anything he might think or feel about the women in his life. But I just can’t get to the place where punning on my wife’s corpse as fertilizer for my lawn gets me to crack a smile.  I see the joke and I ‘get it’, I appreciate the cleverly written lyrics and certainly the masterful handling of the guitar, but my funny bone is just broken on this one.

And that’s ok.  The song doesn’t hurt me and, I’d argue, it doesn’t truly hurt anyone else.  If you can make an argument about its misogyny, post it on the internet with your right to free speech, and organize people who agree with you to boycott the National Endowment for the Arts for recognizing him or Smithsonian-Folkways for publishing him, it’s hard for me to see the damage.  Frankly, that’s all a bit silly to my thinking, but that’s just me.  Instead of feeling nasty about what offends me, I’d rather just find something else that makes me laugh.

On the other hand, I do think in the course of this discussion it’s worth *remembering* that “Fertile Liza” links directly to a chain of songs that was forged at a time when doing real damage to women was indeed the social norm – even expectation – among men.  And, I’m not talking for now about murder ballads.  If you’ll abide, I’d rather play the loose role of musical historian on this one, not the role of political activist.

I can’t possibly be comprehensive on the subject without much more time for research, but a few key examples will be enlightening.  This won’t be a ‘deep dive’ long post – (hey, I saw that fist pump!)  For now, I just want to fire a few neurons in our collective ‘long memory’.

Ain’t it a shame to beat your wife on Sunday?

I know some of you are already building up a head of steam, fired by your moral indignation.  It’s coming out your ears!  I feel it too, don’t worry.  But my steam is keeping me moving, and I’m not feeling like I’ll blow.  I think I learned how to harness that moral turpitude after years of listening to the old songs in all their gore and glory.  Still, maybe you’re disgusted with Pennington and his song.  Ok then, I get it.  Is Pete Seeger more to your liking?  We can’t possibly question his commitment to women’s rights, after all.

Fiddlin’ John Carson’s version from 1927 seems to be the earliest known recording of this one, and it came to modern folk audiences through Seeger’s playing and a version by The New Lost City Ramblers.  It’s a fascinating case really.  The comic formula is quite simple and effective.  It’s a shame to do ‘X’ (something sinful, or at least worldly) on Sunday, the Lord’s day, when you’ve got every other day in the rest of the week to do it!  And X is something pleasurable like getting drunk, playing cards, etc.  But, beating your wife?  Yep, that’s there too.  So, the song’s formula is clearly funny, but the content of that one verse isn’t – any more.

Now, before some of you go jumping to conclusions and drawing connections between Pennington’s rural Kentucky roots and white old-time southern string band musicians like John Carson – I mean by way of thinking something like “all those good old southern boys always want to keep women in their place” – realize that it’s quite possible this song has its roots in the African-American folk tradition.  It’s certainly found there too.  Lead Belly recorded a beautiful acapella version, though interestingly he manages to deftly straddle the ethical line while in fact magnifying the humor overall by conducting a dialogue with himself throughout.  You just gotta hear it to know what I mean.  “Oh look out now…”

I ain’t never done no man no harm…

Of course, we recently heard something decidedly less deft, at least in relation to violence towards women, in one African-American prison blues version of “Bad Lee Brown.”  You’ll recall that song is also known as “Little Sadie”, a misogynist murder ballad if ever there was one.  That particular version was collected and then printed by John and Alan Lomax. If you want, you can check out the lyrics here – pay special attention to the last couplet wherein the offending material is found.  What we already discovered as an otherwise brilliant psychological survival tool for black men in southern prisons, and a well-coded indictment of the southern legal system to boot, is also woven with some of this mess:

“Here for the rest of my natural life
and all I ever done was kill my wife.”

I know, right?  You couldn’t possibly enjoy that.  Could you?  Well, let me play you a song my mom loved, and which she shared with me when I was young.

Lyrics for “Parchman Farm” by Mose Allison

“Parchman Farm” by Mose Allison (YouTube)

Why, when Mose Alison gets to the same nasty comic twist at the end, are we likely not to wince?  Is it just the awesome nature of the Jazz that makes us want to play it again?  I don’t know!  I already told you I don’t have the answers.  But I defy you to listen to this track and not understand at least that authentic, powerful musical beauty can exist side by side with deeply troubling lyrical sentiment.  Does the former temper the latter?  I think we can see objectively that it can.  Should it?  Is it truly enough to make the troubling content ‘ok’?  Those are the the kind of answers you’ll have to find for yourself if you’re so inclined.

But, I have to keep being honest.  Something for me about the way Mose delivers the whole song, and particularly that last line, actually makes it acceptable for me.  I’m still not really laughing, but at least it doesn’t keep me from playing the song again – and again.  And I’ll always think of my mom in a most positive way when I do.

I cut me a hickory as long as my arm…

This is starting to get long, so let’s cut it off with just one more example.  This time we’ll go back to Kentucky.  Eh, actually we’ll go all the way back to the Auld Country, lest you think this awful humor is some sort of American idiosyncrasy.  But we’ll stay rooted in America.

This one I’m giving you first in a version that you may indeed want to hear repeatedly, despite the domestic violence.  I use it every year in my history class.  It essentially works using the same formulation as the songs above – by assigning a lower value to women’s lives and roles, and then banking on that for the joke’s payoff.

In this performance, traditional ballad singer Jean Ritchie reinterprets the old mountain story of beating a spoiled wife to show her how to keep her place, “Gentle Fair Jenny”.  Interestingly, she wrote of this piece in her songbook Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, back in 1965, the following-

Jean Ritchie

“The men in the family always favored this one, for reasons easy to see.  I don’t see that there’s anything so funny about a man whipping his wife, although I do admit that this Gentle Fair Jenny maybe needed a tap or two.  To appreciate why, you have to understand that in the Kentucky Mountains, the women-folk used to have to (some still do!) do all the work about the house, tending the stock, milking, raising the children, in addition to being field hands and often doing the plowing as well.  The men hunted, claimed they were bringing meat to the table.  Knowing this, you can understand that if a man married a woman who wouldn’t even cook the vittles, that would be a natural catastrophe.”

It seems to me the natural catastrophe is the hand swung in anger, but let’s leave that aside for a moment.

Her explanation may be a bit hard to swallow, though it does give important cultural context.  Yet there’s nothing difficult about understanding her musical interpretation and its context.  Jean takes what was meant to be a funny, teasing song, and delivers it in a way post-modern ears can understand and appreciate.  The lyrics are the same, but she takes the joke out of the song with her music.

The moral of the story is clear.  If you’ve got a spoiled wife who won’t work, give her ‘a tap or two’ until she knows her place.  Ritchie points out in her songbook that the economic realities of frontier living might be seen to justify this.  I don’t know – it seems like equivocation to me, but I never had to live that way.  I do know that Appalachian women had to be mighty strong, because my mother and grandmother were both (Appalachian and mighty strong, I mean!)  Both raised me, and neither ever taught me in words or by example that a woman has one and only subservient place in this world.  Then again, I’m not so sure they wouldn’t have laughed at this song too, if done in a different way than Jean did it.

For example, Frank Profitt’s “Dan Doo” and Hedy West’s “The Wife Wrapt in Wether’s Skin” are the same song, but their musical delivery is entirely different.  If you listen to them, you’ll hear the traditional American way this ballad was meant to be delivered – with dry mountain humor.

But there’s something else different.  That sheep’s (wether’s) skin he covers her with before he beats her – where did that come from?  Britain!  The ballad was in fact cataloged by Francis Child as his #277.  Some speculate that it is from Elizabethan times, and even concurrent with Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.  I don’t know if there is any convincing evidence.  In a different post I’d try to nail all that down; but for this one, I want to stay focused on that sheep’s skin.  It is a leftover from the British ancestor of this Appalachian song.

Burl Ives explains its origins in this recording.

The cooper’s wife was “gentle”, like fair Jenny.  But that doesn’t mean she lacked the aggression her husband so freely applied.  It means she was of the ‘gentle class’ – a rich girl.  The sheep’s skin?  Well, like Ives said – “It was against the law for him to whip her, because she was from the gentry.”  It wasn’t against the law per se for a man to beat a woman.  It was against the law for a commoner to beat a member of the gentry!  I guess if you don’t want to do the time, you figure out a way to hide what the law calls a crime.  Priorities, I suppose…

If you like, you can check out my short Spotify playlist for this ballad to hear some Scots versions of Child 277, called there “The Wee Cooper of Fife” as Ives suggests.  The tone in most is of rollicking humor.  The joke may be nuanced differently than in the Cumberlands of Kentucky, but the brutal message is the same.  “Now ye who ha married a gentle wife, just mind ye o’ the wee cooper o’ Fife.”

Nickety-nackety-noo-noo-noo!

Coda

Ok, I’ve tried to take something depressing and at least make it interesting.  I won’t flatter myself that my little attempts at humor herein made anything better, but I hope they succeeded more effectively than the jokes in these songs!  I know, I know; I benefited from an extremely low bar.  It’s a tactic I’m never ashamed to use.

Next up this week we’ll get back to some much needed laughter.  I appreciate your going off with me on this sad tangent, but now we’re headed back in the direction originally intended for this series.

So…  Becky, what you got??!!