“Moll Dying of Syphilis” by William Hogarth (1697-1764)
Image from the National Library of Medicine.

Murder ballads help us chart the frontiers of our empathy. They provide the chance to connect emotionally with victims and villains; sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with revulsion. Through them, we inhabit the perspectives of the dead and dying, witnesses and bystanders, and often the poor souls who, rightly or wrongly, voluntarily or in desperation, take the lives of others. The ballads where we sing the part of the killer and narrate deadly deeds can be especially affecting. The connection to the characters, even the ones we would not wish to emulate, gives these songs emotional punch and artistic power.

This week, we’re going to launch a short, occasional series on a family of songs grouped under the title “The Unfortunate Rake.” Although some examples, including today’s, stretch the definition of “murder ballad,” these songs tap the emotional resonances found in murder ballads’ confrontations with death. It also provides insight into how the nuances of storytelling and musical arrangement anticipate, structure, and guide our empathy, and to what ends.

The series will focus primarily on three variations of “The Unfortunate Rake”: “Pills of White Mercury,” “St. James Infirmary” (or “Gambler’s Blues”), and “Streets of Laredo.” The installments won’t be consecutive, and they’ll be far from exhaustive.

“Pills of White Mercury” may be the oldest of these three examples of “Rake” ballads, but it is the one I encountered most recently. More pertinently, it is closest to the “source” ballad in form and content among the three variations I will explore, as the other two are younger American descendants of an Anglo-Irish forebear, with their own decidedly American twists.

I first heard “Pills” when Tom’s posts on “MacPherson’s Rant” introduced me to The Old Blind Dogs‘ Live album (1999). The title of the song refers to a common 18th and 19th century treatment for syphilis, which the “young comrade” in the story has contracted from a “flash girl.”

Wait a minute. Where’s the murder?  Right. We have no violence, either; although we do have sex.. The proximate cause of death is a sexually-transmitted bacterium, Treponema pallidum, to be precise–syphilis. (Yes, I had to throw out all the jokes about this post going viral.)

The song’s “comrade wrapped up in white flannel,” and the orders for the military-style funeral procession were what initially caught my attention, resembling “St. James Infirmary” and “Streets of Laredo,” which were long familiar to me. The comrade’s imminent death and the connection to “Streets of Laredo” made this song enough of a murder ballad for our purposes. That its story might help me solve for myself the longstanding enigma of “Gambler’s Blues” lured me further, but that discussion will be for a later post.

Whodunnit?

Old Blind Dogs
(picture by Louis DeCarlo)

The song is ambiguous about who the real killer is. Is it the victim’s own bad decisions? Is it the person who infected the victim? Is it the infection itself? Our protagonist, for his part, doesn’t so much blame the “flash girl” for the disease as much as for not telling him about it. This is at least true for the chorus. The fourth stanza is more ambiguous about the “flash girls”:

It’s down on the corner two flash girls were talking
One to the other did whisper and say
“There goes that young man who once was so jolly
Now for his sins his poor body must pay”

Stanzas in a few of the early versions of “Rake” collected on the Folkways album create the impression that the flash girls could be empathizing with him; that he has “fallen” to their condition. Some variants have them saying “Here comes a young sailor whose money we’ll squander, here comes a young sailor cut down in his prime.” These verses could also be read as them exacting a small bit of revenge, in that they already shared in his infected fate.

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