Spoon River Murder Ballads
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Bucknerâs more intense, frenzied âElmer Karrâ puts music to the story of Elmer Karr; perhaps more accurately to his full story than just to the âepitaphâ below:
âElmer Karrâ
What but the love of God could have softened
And made forgiving the people of Spoon River
Toward me who wronged the bed of Thomas Merritt
And murdered him beside?
Oh, loving hearts that took me in again
When I returned from fourteen years in prison!
Oh, helping hands that in the church received me
And heard with tears my penitent confession,
Who took the sacrament of bread and wine!
Repent, ye living ones, and rest with Jesus.
Thatâs right, friends. Lest you think the grim, bone-sober tales of Spoon River completely bereft of redemption, you can find it in the forgiven fortunes of Elmer Karr. Tom Merritt met his fate feeling both the pull of murderous revenge and the tragic coincidence of being unprepared for the fatal confrontation; finding himself on the wrong side of it when it came. Bucknerâs Mrs. Merritt is silent before us, just as she was silent before the jury, and throughout her thirty years in prison. Mastersâs epitaphs for Mrs. Merritt and Karr display the tension between the actorsâ own self-justifications and the judgment of Spoon River townfolk. The townâs condemnation falls heavily and unremittingly on the unfaithful wife. The cuckolding, maddened, murderous youth finds Jesus and the warm embrace of neighbors after heâs paid his significantly smaller debt to society.
âTo gratify his hatredâ
Among the sung musical epitaphs on The Hill, âAmanda Barkerâ stands out as a murder ballad of heartbreaking incisiveness and candor. Arranged similarly to âElmer Karr,â Buckner sings Amandaâs bitter tale of her own demise, which breaks forth with aching intimacy.
HENRY got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husbandâs love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
Underneath this poem is a fulcrum that balances love and hate on one axis, and life and death on another. The point of that fulcrum is as keen as Amandaâs proclamation, offered to the Traveler. Bucknerâs musical rendering of âAmanda Barkerâ ends promptly with her final word, âhatred,â transitioning into his adaptation of âThe Hill,â which is the poem that opens Spoon River. Amanda Barker does not equivocate or hedge, and you know exactly at the end of her brutally candid account which way things have fallen.