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The resulting album, The Hill, named after SRA‘s opening poem was re-released by Merge Records earlier this year, in celebration of Spoon River Anthology‘s 100th anniversary. Since we opened with a cover of “Tom Merritt,” we’ll turn now to Buckner’s originals.

As with the book, not all Buckner’s compositions are murder ballads. Some are not actually songs. The triptych of poems forming the core tale of “Tom Merritt” inspired the first three tracks on the album. These are “Mrs. Merritt,” “Tom Merritt,” and “Elmer Karr.” It was Masters’s decision not to provide a given name for Mrs. Merritt, Tom’s wife. Masters puts Tom’s story first, but Buckner makes the instrumental/ambient “Mrs. Merritt” the album’s opening, setting a haunting tone for what is to come.

So as not to jumble the story, I’ll give you the poems in Masters’s order, although the tracks in the Spotify list above are in Buckner’s. Buckner starts out with organ chords and the sound of creaking doors on “Mrs. Merritt,” sonically hinting at Tom’s story. At the one minute mark, the song yields to up-tempo guitar and Buckner singing. He breaks the lyric in two, inserting an instrumental break that contains, to my ear, an allusion to another SRA-inspired musical work. More on that later.

After the fatal conclusion, and mournful string tag at the end of “Tom Merritt,” “Elmer Karr” opens up with wild, slightly dissonant strumming on steel guitar with a frenzied shaker providing percussion underneath, morphing at the end to electric guitar feedback and some warmer acoustic guitar work underneath.

“Tom Merritt”

At first I suspected something –
She acted so calm and absent-minded.
And one day I heard the back door shut
As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
Back of the smokehouse into the lot
And run across the field.
And I meant to kill him on sight.
But that day, walking near Fourth Bridge
Without a stick or a stone at hand,
All of a sudden I saw him standing
Scared to death, holding his rabbits,
And all I could say was, “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t,”
As he aimed and fired at my heart.

The poem and the resulting songs are ballads in a very compressed sense, giving us the conflict, the recognition, and the reversal in a few short lines. As with the elusive lover, we get the sense that the full story has just escaped out the back door and run off.

In the book, Mrs. Merritt gets to tell her side of the story next:

“Mrs. Merritt”

Silent before the jury
Returning no word to the judge when he asked me
If I had aught to say against the sentence,
Only shaking my head.
What could I say to people who thought
That a woman of thirty-five was at fault
When her lover of nineteen killed her husband?
Even though she had said to him over and over,
“Go away, Elmer, go far away,
I have maddened your brain with the gift of my body:
You will do some terrible thing.”
And just as I feared, he killed my husband;
With which I had nothing to do, before God
Silent for thirty years in prison
And the iron gates of Joliet
Swung as the gray and silent trusties
Carried me out in a coffin.

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