Morning Sun by Edward Hopper (1952)

When I meet new people, it’s just a matter of time–sometimes more, sometimes less–before I mention this murder ballad hobby of mine. I recently started a new job. (You may have inferred as much from the pronounced lack of advertising and pop-ups, but, no, Murder Ballad Monday is not how I make my living.) By way of a chance conversation about Merle Haggard on my first day, I began explaining the blog to my new colleague, Cayce. Pat and I joke among ourselves, and a few others, that mentioning the blog in general party chat can feel awkward or inspire a few weird looks, but generally people get it right away.

Cayce was no exception, and soon came back to me with, “Have you done ‘Silver Dagger’?” I said that had come across it, and we had linked it on our Facebook page once, but that we hadn’t yet explored it in the blog. She couldn’t believe it. “It’s on the list,” I told her, “we just haven’t gotten there yet.”

But I had to think again about whether “Silver Dagger” really qualifies. In most of the versions I had heard up to that point, and certainly in the Dolly Parton version, nobody dies. It’s more an unrequited love ballad or a controlling parent ballad, but not a murder ballad. I dug a little deeper, though, and through listening to a broader range of performances, I think there’s sufficient reason to include it in our genre without too much in the way of apology.

Before diving in, let’s listen to the Dolly Parton performance of “Silver Dagger,” from her 1999 album The Grass is Blue. To my ear, it’s one of the best out there. Let’s hope it will whet your appetite for more. Have no fear, there are other great performances to come. Here’s Parton on the David Letterman show, with a particularly kinetic Sam Bush on mandolin.

It’s not entirely clear to me from this performance that the musicians aren’t syncing to a studio version. You can judge for yourself, I suppose, by listening to the studio version here.

Dolly’s arrangement is a great success, building the instrumentation up gradually, and making very tasteful decisions with regard to adding the harmony–somehow the two voices achieve high and lonesome together, and at just the right moment. You can read her lyrics here. As we’ll see over the course of our posts, she’s singing the “consensus” contemporary version of “Silver Dagger,” much like the Joan Baez-Bob Dylan version we’ll soon hear. She makes only one lyrical tweak, explaining that all men are “fools,” rather than “false,” and adds some “ooh-ing.”

OK, but how does this come to be the consensus version? A quick look at the Wikipedia entry for the song  explains that “Silver Dagger” is but one strain of a reasonably recent ballad of American origin. The other strand is “Katy Dear.” Digging a little more deeply, though, we find “The Silver Dagger” as collected in The Ballad Book, edited by MacEdward Leach (Harper & Brothers, 1955).

Leach accounts for the song as follows: “No printed version of this purely American ballad has been found, in spite of its literary touches. It is known widely throughout the South and West. Stanzas drift from it into ‘The Drowsy Sleeper.'” [Hear Tim Eriksen‘s scintillating performance of “Drowsy Sleeper” on Bandcamp here.]

Leach provides the lyrics as follows from the singing of Mrs. Tiny Gaunt in Rappahannock County, Virginia in 1948. Before I transcribe them, can we just pause for a moment in wonder at the name “Tiny Gaunt.” If I ever take up a singing career, I’d like to find a singing partner with the name “Tiny Gaunt.”

Young men and maids, pray lend attention

The Pearly Snaps

  Of these few lines I’m going to write,
Of a youth, no name I’ll mention,
  Who courted a damsel, a beauty bright.

When his old parents came to know this,
  They strove to part them day and night;
They strove to part him from his jewel,
  “She’s poor, she’s poor,” they often cried.

Down on his bended knees he pleaded,
  Crying, “Father, mother, pity me!
She is my own, my dearest jewel
  What’s this world without her to be?”

She turned her back unto the city
  She walked the green fields and meadows around;
She walked unto some fair broad waters
  And under a shady grove sat down.

She picked up her silver dagger,
  Pierced it through her snow-white breast;
She said these words and gave a stagger;
  “Farewell true love! I’m going to rest.”

Her love, being out upon the water,
  Chanced to hear her dying groan;
He ran, he ran like one distracted:
  “I am ruined, I’m lost, I am left alone.”

She opened her coal-black eyes upon him
  Saying, “O true love, you’ve come too late!
But meet me on the old road Zion,
  Where all our joys will be complete.”

He picked up the bloody dagger,
  Pierced it through his tender heart:
Let this be a sad and woeful warning
  To all true lovers that have to part.

If you’ve read this carefully–and, to tell you the truth, I hadn’t read it all that carefully until I just transcribed it–you may be thinking, “Is this really the same song?” It is, but it may be a little hard to tell. It has the same meter, the same silver dagger, and effectively the same story of parental control and frustrated, then doomed young lovers. The opening stanzas hark back to a song like “Fair Ellender,” in the parents prohibiting the marriage because the young man’s beloved was poor. It ends up a bit like Romeo and Juliet, without the family duels and brawling. This connection will become a little clearer when we listen to “Katy Dear.”

Let’s stick with “Silver Dagger” for a moment. It’s a distillation of one element of the story. It’s less fatal than most murder ballads, and than its companion versions in “Katy Dear” and the one collected by Leach. But, it is, I would argue, a murder ballad in relief. I’ll have to get into the reasons for that a little later, but I hope you’ll keep listening now, and that you’ll come back and read the next two posts.

One of Bob Dylan’s earlier songs

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

Almost all of the contemporary versions I’ve been able to find of “Silver Dagger” hew closely to the “consensus” version Dolly Parton sings above. For reasons of audiographical accuracy, however, Joan Baez is probably the more influential source. Baez and Bob Dylan performed the song in his landmark concert at Philharmonic Hall on Halloween Night, 1964. Continuing the running shtick that the youthful phenom Bob Dylan was the source of ancient, authentic folk music, Baez jokes that the song is one of “Bob Dylan’s earlier songs.”

 Baez also performs the song solo in this televised performance from 1965.

Her studio version is on Spotify here:

A transatlantic concern

The Staves

The majority of the recorded versions of this strain of “Silver Dagger” are recorded by women or with women on lead vocals. My somewhat unscientific survey puts the number somewhere between 66% and 75%. As we’ll see in the next post, “Katy Dear,” and songs entitled “Silver Dagger” that nevertheless follow the “Katy Dear” structure, more often has a male lead singer.

The Floorbirds

This strain of “Silver Dagger” varies little in terms of the narrative details. The arrangements differ more. I’m not going to be exhaustive here, but will put together a Spotify playlist by the end of the week, where you can sample some of the more interesting versions, plus a few that my miss the mark. “Silver Dagger,” at least in this version, is another American ballad that’s made its way eastward back to the British Isles.

Adding to the legacy of Baez and Parton, on the American side, I found The Floorbirds and The Pearly Snaps to provide excellent versions, each distinctive in its own right. The Floorbirds have a more contemporary acoustic feel. The Pearly Snaps come across as more old timey, despite their innovations on the sung melody.

  Silver Dagger “Silver Dagger” by The Floorbirds on Myspace.

Crossing over to the other side of the Atlantic, The Staves provide a faithful version that luxuriates in the harmonies among their three voices–playing to their strength–and supported by restrained instrumentation.  It’s not as stark or emotionally crisp as Parton’s, and the slower, fuller harmonies eke a bit more pity out of the listener.

Here’s the track from their EP:

Scotland’s Maeve MacKinnon provides a strong Celtic-flavored performance, with probably the best instrumental arrangement from among the subset of Scottish and Irish performances.

Silver Dagger “Silver Dagger” by Maeve MacKinnon on Myspace.

I’m not a murder ballad, but I play one on TV

Having listened to at least a couple dozen versions of this variant of the song alone, the most interesting lyrical variations I found came from Australian musical theater actress Ebony Buckle. (Ebony Buckle and Tiny Gaunt would make a great pair, too!) I was struck by the differences in Buckle’s narrative. It’s the same verse structure, but a number of the gender references are reversed, and it’s the suitor’s mother, not the young woman’s, standing in the way. The thwarted young woman encourages her despondent lover to go and find a “rich, young maiden,” instead of a “tender maiden”–suggesting the class theme like in the Tiny Gaunt version collected by Leach. The first clip of her version I heard opened with her dedicating the song “to mothers everywhere.”  This was all very curious.

I’ve since worked out that what sounded like a live version was part of Series 5 of “Inspector George Gently” on BBC One. It’s a performance as part of an an episode entitled “Gently with Class.”  I should have noticed this in the Wikipedia entry earlier, but skipped over that tale. The clip below is taken from the show, and is cut off at the end. I also should have figured out why something wasn’t ringing completely true in the Buckle’s singing–specifically why this singer from Queensland, Australia was hitting some of her vowels like she was from the North of England. (My ear’s not that fine for regional distinctions in English accents, but her feigned (as I learned) Northumberland accent sounded not too far off from Kate Rusby’s spoken Yorkshire accent.) Buckle is singing in character, and even without having seen the whole show I’m assuming I’m not giving too much away to say that it’s her character who dies in some 60’s English version of a Chappaquiddick incident, with even more robust social class dynamics involved.

Buckle keeps the changes, though, in her studio version, which you can hear here:

Buckle’s version adapts to the details of the television plot. It makes you wonder whether years from now the predominant British variants for this song will follow the lead of these adjustments and re-emphasize the social class dimensions.

The Week Ahead

Buckle’s character’s dedication to “mothers everywhere,” however fictional it is, and the fact that most recordings of “Silver Dagger” are sung by women suggest to me that there’s probably something in the mother-daughter dynamic in this song that I’m not fully getting, at least at an emotional, visceral level. I’m neither a mother nor a daughter, but I think that the true resonance of the song lies there, and ties closely in to what makes the song a murder ballad, at least a “murder ballad in relief.” We’ll get to that a little later this week with performances from some icons of the folk era as well as some current leaders of the alt.country/old time renaissance. In the next post, we’ll turn to the versions of “Katy Dear” that give us a different take on love, mortality, and who kills whom and how.

Coda

Before closing this post out completely, I’ll give some of the male “minority report” for this version of the song. The most interesting ones do not appear to be available on official recordings.

Roger McGuinn of the Birds adapted the song for himself because, he says, “This was a ladies’ song. I always wished I could sing it, but I minded doing songs of the opposite gender, so I changed the gender of the song with a few words.” You can read his lyrics here.

The Eagles used to introduce “Take It Easy” with a short a cappella excerpt of the song. If it’s just this that they sing, they give the impression that they are themselves sons of the “Handsome Devil” father.

Unlike The Eagles, the performances that follow clearly keep the song in the young woman’s perspective. Fortunately for us, McGuinn’s challenges in “inhabiting” the song in a woman’s voice are not shared by all. All of the following performances were recorded in 2011. First, here’s Conor O’Brien, of Ireland’s Villagers, with a simple, yet effective, stripped down performance for a radio program.

Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes also provides a solid cover of this strain of the song–an acoustic performance that brings metaphorical electricity. The audio quality is a little muddy, but Pecknold’s strong singing and the intensity he brings to the song make it work well.

Finally, Chris Thile and Michael Daves performed the song on stage at the 2011 Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival. I don’t think they’ve recorded it yet. There’s a bit of crowd noise, which is most distracting at the start, but tends to fade away. Expert picking here is supplemented by the embellishment of a few lyrical refrains inserted into the song.