Lizzie Borden (1860-1927)

Ken here. I’m back again. As it turned out, I had another one in the chute and ready to go. This is our second installment in a short “Murder Ballad Comedy” series. You can read the first installment, on Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad,” here.

“Yesterday in old Fall River…”

Today, we’ll move on to another comedy classic from “The Great Folk Scare” era, with The Chad Mitchell Trio‘s performance of  “Lizzie Borden,” from their 1961 release, A Mighty Day on Campus. Written by Michael Brown, the song is an irreverent and hilarious retelling of the case of Fall River hatchet murders of August 4, 1892.

OK, OK, “hilarious” and “hatchet murders” really shouldn’t go together. We’ll get to the origin of the song soon enough. Let’s start with the origin of the story.

The murders of Abby and Andrew Borden remain unsolved to this day. The only person ever charged in them was the younger of Andrew Borden’s two adult daughters, Lizzie. Abby was Lizzie’s stepmother. Andrew was a successful businessman in Fall River, with a well-earned reputation for miserliness. Abby was killed first (which proved relevant for the settling of Andrew Borden’s estate), but found second in an upstairs bedroom. Mr. Borden was found on a downstairs sofa, and apparently never woke from the nap he had just started there. A number of web sites tell the story and lay out the facts of the case and the trial. See here, here, and here. Martin Fido also provides a reasonably accurate, if somewhat editorialized, radio retelling of the story that you can listen to on Spotify here.

Movie poster from The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975). The movie’s star, Elizabeth Montgomery, was unaware that she was the 6th cousin, once removed, of Lizzie Borden, whom she portrayed.

Bill James also discusses the case at length in his fascinating Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence. He writes:

“The three essential facts about the Lizzie Borden Case are:
1) That it is almost impossible to see how Lizzie could have committed the crime,
2) That it is very, very difficult to understand how anyone else could have committed the crime, and
3) That Lizzie made a number of statements about the case that were self-contradictory and in conflict with the testimony of other persons.”

James proceeds to lay out the extreme improbability that Lizzie was the culprit–she had no history of violent behavior or threats, probably lacked the strength to carry them out, and most crucially did not have enough time between when the murders must have happened and when she called for help to have cleaned herself up and disposed of the evidence. Andrew Borden was most likely killed between 10:55 a.m. and 10:58 a.m. Lizzie called for help just after 11 a.m.

James presents a convincing argument that the jury was right to acquit her and that she should have been excluded as a suspect in the first place, and within minutes of the crime. She was indicted because of inconsistent statements she made under interrogation…while on morphine…after her parents were murdered. The decisive factor in taking the case to trial was that she was seen burning a dress several days after the incident. The dress had been spattered with paint prior the crimes, and had already been seen by crime scene investigators, who had never found a trace of blood on Lizzie.

It’s time to move to the song, but the story is important because the sensational and unsolved nature of the case is likely a crucial factor in what kind of music was, and was not, made in response.

“No, you can’t chop your papa up in Massachusetts…“

Here’s the song as it appeared on the album.

The audio quality on the YouTube video is not terrific, but it contains the intro to the song found on the Spotify track and the album. For a cleaner recording on YouTube, you can listen here, but be advised that this video has some rather gruesome (although blurry) black and white photographs of the murder scene.

You can find a copy of the lyrics here.

For readers more familiar with the murder ballad genre the lines of the chorus alone would be more than enough to make the song hilarious. After all, real murder ballads don’t emerge from things that happen in Massachusetts. I’m sure I’ll now have some of our friendly readers lobbing exceptions my way, and I’ll welcome them, but there’s no denying that when it comes to North American sweet spots for the murder ballad genre, New England is lacking.

Consider this: the Borden case was a sensational and well-publicized murder, happening very close to major population centers in Massachusetts, but does not to my knowledge have a real murder ballad associated with it, at least generated from that era. It has been a source for artistic creativity since, and that itself could fill up another post. Then consider that within the space of several years from that same date, 3 murders in a relatively small section of St. Louis spawned three of America’s most famous murder ballads–“Frankie and Johnny,” “Duncan and Brady,” and “Stack-o-Lee.”

The Chad Mitchell Trio

Incidentally, I was tempted to make a similar point in discussing Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad,” but was wary of getting entrapped in the snares Lehrer lays for folk purists in that song. True Irish murder ballads, not derived from earlier English or Scottish (or other) sources, are only slightly less rare than Massachusetts ones. Again, there are exceptions. Forces are at work in the cultural locations of these crimes that affect how they get told–and it doesn’t entirely have to do with the availability of other media.

Aside from its geographical and cultural location, the other factor that probably excluded it from song and balladry at the time was that the crime was never solved. Nobody knows what human drama led to that extraordinarily grisly turn of events, so it’s quite difficult to make a real story of it. Curiously, both this ambiguity and the horror probably also made it reasonably fair game for Michael Brown’s comic songwriting, if only 60 years later.

The crime also took place within the realm of supposed New England propriety, which the song pokes repeatedly for comic effect. The contrast between the extremely dark, gothic reality of the gruesome murders, and our assumptions about New England upper middle class propriety set the stage for most of the laughs, with a helpful bit of word play. Brown’s song gets a few of the facts wrong, but it’s clear that verisimilitude would not really be his friend in writing a song such as this.

“Lizzie kinda rearranged him…”

The Chad Mitchell Trio’s version became their biggest hit, peaking at #43 in 1962. The performance was recorded at Brooklyn College, and the guitar accompaniment was provided by Jim McGuinn, who later changed his name to Roger and founded The Byrds. It’s also the best of the ones I’ve found.

The song was originally written by Michael Brown for the Broadway revue, New Faces of 1952. The “Lizzie Borden” piece was a segment of Brown’s longer piece, “Fall River Hoedown.” Here’s “Fall River Hoedown” as it appeared in the motion picture version of the revue in 1954.

There’s a certain amount of Broadway camp to the whole thing, but I’m going to give the win to The Chad Mitchell Trio for comic timing and delivery. They also have the advantage of presenting the song as an interruption in some otherwise more straightforward material, and the spoken introduction helps set up the performance masterfully. You can listen to a few other recordings of Brown’s “Lizzie Borden” in this short Spotify playlist.

The Chad Mitchell Trio picked up “Lizzie Borden” a few times in their “reunion” years. Here’s a tuxedoed Trio performing a few verses as part of a medley in 2010:

And, finally, returning to the scene of the crime, is a clip of the Trio attempting, and occasionally flubbing, the song in an impromptu session at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River:

What you got?!

That’s it for this second installment in our comedy mini-series. Our next one will come from one of my fellow bloggers. Stay tuned! Thanks for reading.