Frank Fairfield

This is the third of three posts on the North Carolina murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith.” Read the first here and the second here.

One of the implicit questions in the previous two posts is whether the real story behind the murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith” affects how we treat it as art. For example, if we’re inclined to criticize Frank Proffitt for creating an especially misogynistic version of this murder ballad, is his transgression greater or less for not really attending to the facts. Is it more troubling as an essentially made-up murder ballad, or more troubling as an artistic harangue of a real-life victim who was, by all accounts, simple-minded and killed by a man with a history of drinking, gambling, and womanizing? Is it possible that he grabbed onto an inner part of the folklore behind the story that other artists were too decorous to address? How long after the events the song describes does it even matter that it refers to a true story? How does it affect how we hear DeGraff the character (in the song) and his claim of innocence if we know that DeGraff the person confessed on the gallows?

By the time Crooked Still and many of the others we’ve listened to and will listen to today get around to “Poor Ellen Smith,” the song has become just a part of the folk canon. We can’t save her any more than we can save the real life Omie Wise, Al Britt, or Fair Ellender, if indeed there was one. The song no longer tells a “news story,” but rather an enduring story–betrayal and heartbreak, denial or confession.

Laura Brooke

Another blogger commenting on the song observed that he finds its performances by women to be generally more affecting than those by men. I’d have to agree with him–whether by accident or by some dynamic between voice and narrative, it’s the women who seem to have the edge in making the song viable artistically. They make it more than just a historical curiosity or a platform for instrumental virtuosity. This is all the more ironic as the song is sung from the perspective of Peter DeGraff. Ellen herself is pretty quiet in this whole affair, which is a notable lacuna in the folklore. Nobody really tells her side of the story.

“Poor Ellen Smith” has a long list of excellent musical interpreters. We’ve listened to a few already in the previous posts. I’ll feature the rest in a Spotify playlist below. In the meantime, I want to highlight a couple that still help make the song “new” to me, even after hearing it dozens of times. These two performances stray from the traditional melodic formula further than most.

We’ll start with the old time or “Down Home” sound of California’s Frank Fairfield. In the 2009 recording below, Fairfield gives “Poor Ellen Smith” an old time cast that may be the biggest musical innovation in the song we’ve heard so far. We’ve noted the song’s close affiliation with the “Protection”/”How Firm a Foundation” tune through the bulk of its history.

I haven’t yet found any reason to believe that Fairfield’s version is actually more melodically “authentic” than those, despite his spare arrangement of it and his singing style. He makes the song sound older than it is. I can’t find a clear antecedent for it, and it bears only the loosest of resemblances to the original tune. Fairfield’s piece is a work of art masquerading as folk tradition, capturing a particular aesthetic for the song, and capturing it well–but, capturing it much differently than the rest of its interpreters, traditional and otherwise.

Also available on Vimeo and Cinely.

My other favorite take on the song, from Laura Brooke, takes a different direction. Brooke’s instrumentation is more contemporary–with a deeply resonant acoustic guitar arrangement providing its own kind of firm foundation. The melody and the guitar accompaniment gestures at “Protection,” but improvises gently around it. It’s Brooke’s keen voice of the Ozarks that grabs me, though.  Hers is the voice of the song that gets inside my head. Hers is the voice that elicits empathy for Ellen and for Peter DeGraff.

(For those of you not able to access Spotify, I haven’t been able to find a version of Brooke’s performance on Myspace or Bandcamp, but it is available on iTunes and Amazon.com.)

So, that will wrap it up for now. If you’re still on the hunt for your favorite version of “Poor Ellen Smith,” you can check out our Spotify playlist. Feel free, also, to add a link to your favorite version in the comments.

Coda: “X” marks the spot

Yes, “Poor Ellen Smith,” like its sister murder ballad “Tom Dooley,” also made its way to the Kingston Trio. The Trio’s “Dooley” likely came via Frank Warner, but its not clear that this song followed the same path, as Warner had captured the strikingly different Frank Proffitt lyrics. They present a significantly “spruced-up” version, with a bizarre mix of uptempo cheerfulness, mangled bodies, and “X” , rather than blood, marking the spot where Poor Ellen was found. I add it to the end here just for the sake of adding further documentation to “The Great Folk Scare,” of the late 50s and early 60s.