Spoon River Murder Ballads
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Buckner’s more intense, frenzied “Elmer Karr” puts music to the story of Elmer Karr; perhaps more accurately to his full story than just to the “epitaph” below:
“Elmer Karr”
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.
That’s 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. Buckner’s Mrs. Merritt is silent before us, just as she was silent before the jury, and throughout her thirty years in prison. Masters’s epitaphs for Mrs. Merritt and Karr display the tension between the actors’ own self-justifications and the judgment of Spoon River townfolk. The town’s condemnation falls heavily and unremittingly on the unfaithful wife. The cuckolding, maddened, murderous youth finds Jesus and the warm embrace of neighbors after he’s paid his significantly smaller debt to society.
Mads Mikkelsen as Elmer Karr from “Tom Merritt” (1999), movie still
“To gratify his hatred”
Among the sung musical epitaphs on The Hill, “Amanda Barker” stands out as a murder ballad of heartbreaking incisiveness and candor. Arranged similarly to “Elmer Karr,” Buckner sings Amanda’s 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 husband’s 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 Amanda’s proclamation, offered to the Traveler. Buckner’s musical rendering of “Amanda Barker” ends promptly with her final word, “hatred,” transitioning into his adaptation of “The Hill,” 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.