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“The Nameless Murderess” presents us with a picaresque; one with a feminist and slightly supernatural bent. It is the story of someone of a lower social class whose actions skewer the structures of power and false patinas of rectitude of the powerful. She is neither fully heroine nor antiheroine, but is forced by circumstances into “choosing a mortal sin,” although otherwise moral in disposition. She has remorse, but also defiance.

As a picaresque, the song is akin to “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” by The Decemberists, which we discussed a few years ago, and which appeared on that band’s album Picaresque, appropriately enough. “Mariner’s” involves a sailor exacting dogged vengeance on the man who betrayed his mother when he was a young man. After a long search, “hero” and “villain” find themselves in the belly of a whale, the last two survivors of a shipwreck. The son of the wronged mother quickly intends to become the only survivor, even in his hopeless situation.

Another relevant comparison from within The Once’s own oeuvre is the historical ballad “Marguerite.” That song tells the true story of a young noblewoman marooned by her uncle on a deserted island in the Canadian Maritimes for her romantic involvement with a young man aboard ship. Her lover and their son die on the island, but Marguerite survives and returns to France to confront her uncle and live out her life thinking back to the days of love. Although their protagonists are born to different social classes, both “Marguerite” and “The Nameless Murderess” pursue the work of “poetic justice,” or perhaps more aptly, “poetic mercy,” especially in dramatizing the hard fate of women during a time when, as Hollett says, “women weren’t even considered ‘people.'”

Critics draw connections between “The Nameless Murderess” and Tom Waits and Bertolt Brecht. You can indeed hear the echoes of Waitsian “clank and bangers,” or the carnival-like arrangement of Brecht’s on “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” (Mack the Knife). The comparisons are apt, and highlight this song’s adept blending of folk elements with more contemporary thematic content. Waits drew from the Maria Marten “Red Barn Murder” for his own, more modern “Murder in the Red Barn.” Brecht drew from the German moritat tradition for his murder ballad/social critique “Mack the Knife” (YouTube, Spotify). Similarly, “The Nameless Murderess” deploys conventions of language, setting, nursery rhyme, and myth to contribute something that is meaningfully both traditional and innovative.

I suggested earlier that “The Nameless Murderess” is tragicomic. I don’t mean to say that it is funny, per se. Although the content of the story is grim, the spirit of its delivery (and the arrangement), as well as final resolution by Saint Francis pull it into a kind of happy ending, at least on its own terms. By the time we get there, though, our murderess’s story makes a substantive and tragic point.

“Winning”

Geraldine Hollett (source: uncredited photo
from The Once’s Facebook page)

A few weeks ago, musicologist Scott Spencer invited me to talk about murder ballads with his graduate seminar on Irish music at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. I further extended the invitation to Becky Poole, songwriter and MBMonday blogger. In the course of the conversation, Becky talked about her interest as a songwriter in creating murder ballads where the woman “wins.”

This desire informs the two strategies she pursues in her songwriting with her murder ballad duo, Eileen. In the first, she takes traditional murder ballads, like “Omie Wise,” and rewrites the ending with a reversal of fortune, so that Omie fends off John Lewis’s attack, and he dies. In the second, she writes original murder ballads that explore the stories of real or imagined female killers, as in “Let You Go” (real and tragic) or “Angel of Mercy” (imagined and comic).

I believe Becky would acknowledge that “win” may not be the most accurate term, but provides a useful shorthand. I don’t think she means to say that we should celebrate one party in a song killing another. You could argue that some versions of “Omie Wise” emphasize John Lewis as getting away with the murder, and therefore “winning,” and the main point of the story is that Omie went astray morally because of lust and greed. What I think Becky means by “win” is that the songs incorporate women characters as people of greater moral complexity, with greater control over their fates than merely being victims—or at least that women weren’t always the ones clearly “losing.” The long folk tradition has authentic examples of reversal stories (e.g. “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight“), but the overall imbalance on the victim side is difficult to deny.

This conversation at USC and my recent post about Vince Gill’s “Billy Paul,” impelled me to discuss “The Nameless Murderess” this week. Gill’s song was about the loss of his friend, a golf caddy who killed his ex-girlfriend and then himself a few days later. The song is really about making sense of his grief. It’s a legitimate and authentic starting point for coping artistically with it. The song left out the story of the woman Billy Paul killed, however, and any attempt at poetic justice on her behalf.

To my knowledge, nobody has written a “Ballad of Wendy Sue”; that is, for the woman killed by “Billy Paul,” who died at 46, leaving behind children and grandchildren. Again, this is not Gill’s responsibility. He had to write the song that was meaningful to him, but finding the story behind that song affected me, and I felt a certain imbalance, or something missing. Perhaps I should write a “Ballad of Wendy Sue.” I’m not yet a songwriter. As a blogger and critic, though, and as a listener, I found myself gravitating to songs that address that imbalance imaginatively, and provide some poetic reconciliation, at least, even if resolution and justice are too much to ask.

Ultimately, both “Billy Paul” and “The Nameless Murderess” are united by the theme of mercy more than justice. It’s a dominant theme of Gill’s song, and it decides between heaven and hell for the Nameless Murderess. Perhaps exploring that quality of mercy is an offering that murder ballads are particularly well positioned to make.