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This revelatory nature begins to give way in the aggregate. For all the candor from each individual, the reader must cobble together the truth, or a truth, among the sometimes overlapping accounts, which don’t always agree. The poems represent blunt and grim counterparts to the more comforting fictions of actual epitaphs. Masters notes this contrast in “Richard Bone,” the epitaph of Spoon River’s stonemason:

“Richard Bone”

When I first came to Spoon River
I did not know whether what they told me
Was true or false.
They would bring me the epitaph
And stand around the shop while I worked
And say “He was so kind,” “He was so wonderful,”
“She was the sweetest woman,” “He was a consistent Christian.”
And I chiseled for them whatever they wished,
All in ignorance of the truth.
But later, as I lived among the people here,
I knew how near to the life
Were the epitaphs that were ordered for them as they died.
But still I chiseled whatever they paid me to chisel
And made myself party to the false chronicles
Of the stones,
Even as the historian does who writes
Without knowing the truth,
Or because he is influenced to hide it.

American Gothic (1930), Grant Wood

We’ve written about songs before under the category of “Conversations with Death,” songs that while they are not murder ballads, reflect trenchant reckonings with mortality through music and song. The poems of the Spoon River Anthology represent something more like “Conversations with Life,” with dead characters confessing their truths and their lies more openly than they dared to in life.

In the aggregate, Masters pulls the covers off of small town, rural life, displaying more openly a moral decay decidedly at odds with the idea of a brave republic and its agrarian virtue.This book is no Little House on the Prairie.

As John E. Hallwas writes, Spoon River Anthology is “a depiction of the struggle for self-realization in a society that has lost contact with the great democratic vision that once gave purpose and meaning to American lives, and an account of the poet’s quest to resolve his inner conflicts and to restore that vision.”

That’s a lot of ground for just the murder ballads we discuss today to cover, but we will see those signs. We’ll see them in the lives of the characters Masters and in his musical interpreter depict, and in the uncompromising and unsentimental way in which they do it.

The Hill

Album cover for The Hill

In 1996, eighty one years or so from the publication of Masters’s book, alt.country singer-songwriter Richard Buckner sequesters himself for a week in a motel near Death Valley. He has a guitar, a four-track recording device, and a copy of Spoon River Anthology. Over the course of the week, he records a suite of the poems onto a cassette. He then sets it aside for several years, until a friend finds the tape. At that time, Buckner gets inspired to develop the songs into an album, kickstarting his way out of a bout of writer’s block with a more thorough and produced album-length string of songs, each flowing, or sometimes slamming, directly into the next.

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