“Murder in the Red Barn” by Jaya King

“…I think the world is going to be here a whole lot longer after we’re gone. I’m just waiting for the whole world to open up and swallow us all in, scrape us all off its back. I think the world is a living organism. When you stick a shovel in the ground, have you ever heard the earth go ‘Uhhgm’? And we’re living on the decomposed remains of our ancestors, both animal, mineral, and vegetable. So it is a living thing. I don’t think it’s going to die screaming. I think we’re going to die screaming, in the swamp of time.” — Tom Waits (interview with Brian Brannon, 1993)

When the ground’s soft for diggin’

Yes, yes, we now arrive at what many of you have been waiting for: the inimitable Tom Waits and his gifted spouse and collaborator, Kathleen Brennan. Our first post this week discussed the facts of the Maria Marten story, or “The Red Barn Murder,” and some of the early alterations of those facts as soon as songs like “The Murder of Maria Marten” or “The Suffolk Tragedy” appeared. The next post discussed why the song stayed so English, and how a commercially-developed popular song became a folk song, although only for some and not until much later.

Now, thanks to Mr. Waits and Ms. Brennan, our song take a trip to America. Parts of it do, anyway. Along the way, we ditch the facts entirely, most likely for the sake of something more salient and relevant. We get a song that represents a distinct artistic engagement with the raw material–distinct from its popular origins, and doing something quite amazing with the “folk elements” of the story.

Waits and Brennan are favorites of ours, and favorites of a good many of our readers. Shaleane featured “Frank’s Wild Years” last year, and included a moving reflection on their partnership in one post that week.

Murder in the Red Barn

In Waits’s “Murder in the Red Barn,” we have scarcely a trace of the original Corder-Marten story. Waits and Brennan make no sincere attempt at a journalistic depiction of it. They take an element or two and go somewhere extraordinary.

Here’s the recording of the song from Waits‘s 1992 album Bone Machine. The album was his first of new material in about five years, following Frank’s Wild Years. Waits also released a compilation album and contributed to the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch‘s film Night on Earth in the time in between.  (Night on Earth is my favorite film. Waits’s soundtrack is mostly instrumental, and not too far afield of the percussive instrumentation of Bone Machine in parts. “Back in the Good Old World“ provides the main theme, and a moving vocal performance from Waits.)

Bone Machine received positive reviews for its extended and interrelated themes, and its “preoccupation with death.” The distorted photo on the album cover on the Spotify clip below is of Waits, taken by Jesse Dylan, Bob Dylan’s son.

Listen on YouTube here.

Here are the lyrics. I’m going to print them out in full, because they’re directly relevant to what follows.

There was a murder in the red barn
Murder in the red barn

The trees are bending over 
The cows are lying down
The autumn’s taking over
You can hear the Buckshot hounds
The watchman said to Reba the loon
Was it pale at Manzanita
Or Blind Bob the racoon?
Pin it on a drifter 
They sleep beneath the bridge
One plays the violin 
And sleeps inside a fridge
There was a murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn

Someone’s crying in the woods
Someone’s burying all his clothes
Now Slam the Crank from Wheezer 
Slept outside last night and froze
Road kill has its seasons 
Just like anything
It’s possums in the autumn 
And it’s farm cats in the spring
There was a murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn
Now thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house 
Or covet thy neighbor’s wife
But for some 
Murder is the only door thru which they enter life

Now they surrounded the house
They smoked him out
They took him off in chains
The sky turned black and bruised 
And we had months of heavy rains
Now the ravens nest in the rotted roof 
Of Chenoweth’s old place
And noone’s asking Cal 
About that scar upon his face
‘Cause there’s nothin’ strange 
About an axe with bloodstains in the barn
There’s always some killin’ 
You got to do around the farm
A murder in the red barn
Murder in the red barn

Now the woods will never tell 
What sleeps beneath the trees
Or what’s buried ‘neath a rock 
Or hiding in the leaves
‘Cause road kill has it’s seasons 
Just like anything
It’s possums in the autumn 
And it’s farm cats in the spring
There was a murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn

Now a lady can’t do nothin’ 
Without folks’ tongues waggin’
Is that blood on the tree 
Or is it autumn’s red blaze
When the ground’s soft for diggin’ 
And the rain will bring all this gloom
There’s nothing wrong with a lady 
Drinking alone in a room
But there was a murder in the red barn
A murder in the red barn

“I think that sometimes the songs that last the longest are the ones you don’t necessarily understand.”      — Tom Waits, interviewed by David Dye on NPR’s World Cafe, 2006. (This is a great interview, although perhaps not as good as this one. At the end of the World Cafe piece are a few songs from a concert performance that includes “Murder in the Red Barn.”)

“I’m a big liar.”

We generally aim in our song excavations to unearth something new for our readers and ourselves. Simultaneously, we want to avoid killing the song through overanalysis. Anything too definitive is usually wrong. It can be a trick, as different elements of a song resonate with different people, and we remain aware that songs, at least the best ones, most often involve an “inherent indeterminacy of meaning.”

In some ways, even linking Waits’s “Murder in the Red Barn” with the various Maria Marten songs is a stretch, although some see it as obvious. With the exception of the Red Barn itself, though, and the mention of a murder, nothing in the song ties it directly back to that episode. Such a conjecture is reasonable, of course, given Waits’s affinity for murder ballads (see below). With his interest in life’s sideshows, real sideshows, and the bizarre hidden corners of life, it’s likely that he came across the Tod Slaughter melodrama as some late night movie on television. I haven’t yet found a source where Waits directly refers to the Corder-Marten affair. Waits is famously elusive when asked for a straight answer.

One lyric source for the song cites Waits’s description from Bone Machine‘s press kit:

“It is said, for some, murder is the only door through which they enter life. I guess that’s true. It’s just a story about a small town murder. How everything gets covered up. And the weather changes everything. Pretty soon you stop talking about it, and you don’t even remember it anymore, and you move on. I don’t know what else to say about it. I like it. It’s like that Bobbie Gentry song… [“Ode To Billy Joe.”]” 

The concluding verse could be a sly reference to Marten’s step-mother coming under suspicion for being involved in her disappearance. That’s about as close as we’re going to get from here on in to anything directly related to the actual Maria Marten story.

One recent blog post reviewing the song, is circumspect about tying the song too directly to the original story, but moves to another curious conclusion in interpreting the song. The blogger writes, “In the song, however, Tom Waits transplants the [Red Barn Murder] incident to America’s Deep South, seemingly in the early or mid 20th Century.” He alleges that Waits’s depiction of the South “would make Faulkner proud.”

Although the writer makes other reasonable thematic interpretations, I can’t find a single element of the song that sets it in the American Deep South. It’s rural, certainly; and it’s my understanding that Bone Machine took shape after Waits moved with his family from the city to the country. The allegation that it’s set in the South, though, suggests more about the blogger’s assumptions about the South (rural, populated by gritty drifters with exotic names) than it reveals about the song. (The blogger also interprets another Waits piece, “Don’t Go Into That Barn,” perhaps a companion piece to “Red Barn,” as being in the South–again without much evidence. That song’s geographic clues set it in Ohio, if anywhere.) In this song, “Manzanita” is a clue pointing to California, or the West more broadly, although it points most directly to a word that sounds right in that place.

“Yeah, the truth of things is not something I particularly like. I go more for a good story than what really happened. That’s just the way I am.” (Waits interview with P. Silverton, 1992)

The Red Barn

As I suggested in the last post, the Red Barn is an evocative image–part of the staying power of the song in the English murder ballad repertoire. Whether or not it’s what he intends, Waits’s song for me represents an artistic exploration of the Red Barn as a symbol and a setting. He’s developing it as the equivalent of a riverside, a willow garden, or a Western street at high noon. He’s riffing on it, and gradually merging it into the set of natural symbols that we’ve found suffusing murder ballads throughout our ongoing discussion–birds, rivers, forests, etc.

In the 1993 interview with Brian Brannon cited at the top of this post, Waits says:

“There’s always some killing you’ve got to do around the farm. Barns are painted red because that’s where all the slaughtering is done. Originally barns were painted with the blood of dead animals. Before they had paint, there was blood.”

Waits is at least somewhat incorrect about why barns are red. Some barns are red, and they are more likely to be red for different reasons–often rust was mixed with linseed oil, and the combination was meant to seal the wood and prevent the growth of mold. Some may have added blood to the mixture, but barns weren’t originally painted at all. Slaughtering on small farms was more likely to happen outside in the barnyard.

This is all rather beside the point, though. We’re not here to talk about what barns really are.  We’re here to talk about what barns mean. Waits is onto something, at least symbolically, in the sense of the barn being a human construction for engaging the natural world. It’s also a secluded place that can be a little creepy. I’m not going to tie it all down, but that’s part of what’s coming through, amid all the implied hapless scheming of the scapegraces populating the song.

Waits might also be thinking about barns in a slightly different way, as suggested below.

“I think recording can sometimes be a violent operation. I think recording studios sometimes can be like a slaughterhouse, where you have some ideas you want to try and wrestle with. Many times you end up with a lot of feathers. A dead bird and a mouthful of feathers.

 “It’s not easy for me. Music is like a living thing. You don’t wanna murder it…. You don’t wanna splatter it all over the walls. You wanna go into certain worlds; you wanna go into a teardrop or go through a hole in the crack in the plaster. You wanna go someplace you’ve never been before and sometimes those journeys are successful and sometimes you’re left with just dead bodies all over the meadow. Sometimes you realize you didn’t bring enough supplies, you’re outta water. But I love the process of it all.

   “It’s a bit like taking a pill. If you’re doing it right, there’s nothing in the world that’s as thrilling.” (Silverton interview, 1992)

Couldn’t have said it better myself…

Coda

I mentioned above that Waits claims a deep affinity for murder ballads. He lines this out in a piece from Buzz magazine shortly after the release of Bone Machine.  This and most of the other interview quotes above come from Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters (Paul Maher, Jr., ed., 2011)

“I’ve always loved songs of adventure, murder ballads, songs about shipwrecks and terrible acts of depravity and heroism. Erotic tales of seductions, songs of romance, wild courage, and mystery. Everyone has tried at one time or another to live inside a song. Songs where people die for love. Songs of people on the run. Songs of ghost ships or bank robberies. I’ve always wanted to live inside songs and never come back. Songs that are recipes for superstition or unexplained appearances.

   ” ‘They Call the Wind Maria,” ‘Teen Angel,’ Bonnie Bonnie Bedlam,’ ‘Pretty Boy Floyd,’ ‘Springhill Mining Disaster,’ ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol,’ ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,’ ‘The Sinking of the Titanic,’ ‘Three Ravens,’ ‘Zaz Turned Blue,’ ‘Pretty Polly,’ ‘Streets of Laredo,’ ‘Raglan Road,’ ‘John Henry,’ ‘Stagger Lee,’ ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ ‘Frankie and Johnny,’ ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ ‘Volga Boatmen,’ ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King,’ ‘Goodnight-Loving Trail,’ ‘Strange Fruit,’ ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ ‘Spanish is the Loving Tongue,’ ‘Lost in the Stars,’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and ‘Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.’
   “These are a few of my favorites.”