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Madam Geneva & The Balladeer

“Madame Geneva” refers to gin, of course (“gin” is derived from the French genièvre and the Dutch jenever – both words for juniper, the berry used in gin), but in this song it also becomes a place – the balladeer is in the drink, as we hear when Knopfler sings, “you’ll find me in Madame Geneva’s.” He’s not just drinking gin – he’s soaking in it. Still, the use of “in” is open to some interpretation. Knopfler uses it like the name of a bar (it was the name of a bar in New York, long after the gin craze), but it seems also to be a more general reference to “Gin Lane,” the slum district of St Giles Parish in London depicted by Hogarth. Specifically, it’s the area near Seven Dials made famous by many, including Charles Dickens, John Keats, and Agatha Christie. Keats described it as a place “where misery clings to misery for a little warmth, and want and disease lie down side-by-side, and groan together.”

Knopfler uses “Madame Geneva,” though it is more often spelled “Madam Geneva” or, sometimes, “Madam Gineva.” Is this problematic and distracting? A little bit. “Madam” often refers to a woman who runs a brothel. “Madame” usually refers to a married woman. In this way, a “madam” might also be a “madame,” but there are connotative differences that feel important and, in the case of Knopfler’s song, confusing or less than precise.

“Madam” appears in many songs – frequently enough to say it has a considerable history. There’s Madam Marie in Bruce Springsteen’s “4^th of July, Asbury Park,” the Madams who light candles in Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero,” Madam X in the pink spangled dress in Elvis Costello’s “Glitter Gulch,” Madam Wong in John Hiatt’s “Master of Disaster,” the madam in Snoop Dogg’s sexually explicit “Lollipop,” and the mother as madam in the terribly bleak “Boys from the County Hell” by The Pogues. In all of these songs, the use of “madam” instead of “madame” feels appropriate. Knopfler isn’t the first to choose an unexpected spelling. In Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, Harold Hill sings about Marian Paroo, referring to her as “madam librarian” (no e). It’s true she’s not married, but she’s also a librarian and a piano teacher, and she seems like neither madam nor madame.

Knopfler’s portrayal of the balladeer is both somber and gentle, restrained and revealing – and very meta. Yes, a song about a ballad writer is meta, but this song feels exceptionally so. It exploits an emotional response to itself, which is to say that it inevitably provokes a response to the sound of itself – Knopfler’s voice and music. But the song to which we respond is inside the head of someone else (the imagined balladeer) who uses art to exploit an emotional response from those buying his penny broadsides. The song details the suffering of a balladeer writing about the confessions and sins of those sentenced to the gallows, but in the song we hear the balladeer confessing.

How much of Knopfler is revealed in this personification of “other”? It’s hard to say, and of course whenever we speculate about such things we risk sullying some integrity of art, and we move (or risk moving) into the territory of the intentional fallacy. Still, it’s natural to wonder if Knopfler’s inhabitation of an old balladeer fits him more snugly than other dramatizations. If it does, is the song more comfortable or less comfortable to sing? Easier or harder?

A History of Broadsides

Image courtesy wikimedia

For a few centuries, roughly from the sixteenth century and into the mid-nineteenth century, ballad writers used broadsides to hawk news about crimes and executions. They sold these handbills right under the gallows on hanging days for a penny a sheet. The broadsides were often full of errors – printing errors, yes, but also false reporting. Confessions were often fabricated, and broadsides frequently contained recycled content and stock images for different crimes (truly fake news). Hawkers sang or chanted verses to push their goods. Musically, the ballads generally imitated hymns, which made them easy to sing and remember. Of course, there is great irony here, as there often is when old forms are adapted for new purposes.

In “Madame Geneva’s” we hear Knopfler singing the part of a ballad writer who drinks gin to keep “the demons at bay.” The man is haunted by his work, and likely guilty of fabricating confessions, which would have contributed to those demons. We must remember, though, that this character is Knopfler’s fabrication, and the confessional tone we hear in the song is another fabrication. The song feels real and personal. It shares an emotional truth by conjuring someone who feels specific but is in fact historically generic. Its first-person narration contributes to a sense of authenticity, as does the general historical framework: there were gallows and there were gallows ballads, and there was a lot of gin. And yet, it’s a fake confession from an imagined character based on real characters who faked the confessions of those condemned.

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