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I’m compelled to mention here that the prevailing theory as to the origin of syphilis in Europe is that the bacteria responsible for it returned from the Americas with Christopher Columbus’s crew. The first well-recorded outbreak in Europe began among troops conquering Naples for French King Charles VIII in 1495. Former members of Columbus’s crew fought in the armies of Charles VIII. The resulting outbreak may have killed as many as five million people in a new climate amid a previously unexposed population. Before syphilis had a name, enemy countries used to describe it as the national disease of their opponents (“The French Disease,” “The Spanish Disease”), reinforcing the idea of the morally degraded state of the enemy. For our purposes here, though, the cultural association of the disease with sailors, soldiers, and prostitute camp followers was a strong one, even if they didn’t have a precise idea at the time of the malady’s source.

The Scots lyrics used by The Old Blind Dogs include the line “Bad luck to the girlie who gied him the glim.” This is wordplay. “Gied him the glim” can mean “gave him the slip” or “disappointed him,” but glim is also Scots for gonorrhea. “The glim” was also treated with mercury, but the other symptoms described in the same verse, and the funeral planning done in others, point to syphilis as what cut the comrade down. (Again, we find ourselves researching the most surprising things in writing about murder ballads…). The specific sexually-transmitted infection matters to our conversation only in that “cut down” really means “killed” here, not just “morally corrupted” or “ruined.”

I’m not going to resolve the ambiguity about the “real” culprit for you. Each person will find their own answer to “Whodunnit?”. Before we’re done, though, I hope to show that the answer may not matter as much as you might think.

“Numerous progeny”

To get started on “Pills of White Mercury” and its musical kin, we’ll need to take a look at some of the archival background on “Rake.” The widespread popularity and variation of this song led folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein to work with Folkways Records on a 1960 album presenting 20 variants of the “Rake.” The album includes all the variants I plan to discuss and more. For a deep dive, I encourage you to explore the album and Goldstein’s liner notes. Consider the spoiler alert issued for some themes we’ll return to in the later posts.

“Pills of White Mercury” is a Scots variant of “The Unfortunate Rake,” marked by its River Ugie setting. English versions of the song refer to “St. James Hospital,” a reference that will re-emerge in America. The original versions of “Rake” depict a conversation between two male comrades, the witness and the dying man. They are soldiers or sailors, as the funeral instructions the dying man provides involve military honors. Goldstein asserts that versions of the song depicting a female protagonist, as a group known as “The Bad Girl’s Lament,” derive from the male-based version. He argues that they must be subsequent because they keep the instructions for a military-style funeral at a time when women would not have been serving openly in the military. (We know from history and song that women were serving covertly.) They are traces of the older form left behind.

Goldstein classifies “Rake” as a “homiletic ballad”: it teaches and warns morally, as murder ballads like “Down in the Willow Garden” or “Banks of the Ohio.” That later forms of “Rake” involve violent killing rather than infection may have something to do with squeamishness about syphilis as a subject for polite company…or even folk song. The oblique reference to the disease by way of its cure creates a semblance of decorous distance from the protagonist’s corruption. Sometimes even mentioning mercury proves too explicit. This distancing may be further reinforced by the “framed” way “Rake” usually tells the story.

“I spied a young comrade”

Crooked Jades

When we explored “Banks of the Ohio” last year, I found Dolly Parton’s recent recording of it disappointing for its introduction of a new opening verse. Traditionally, “Banks” is a first-person, confessional murder ballad in the voice of the killer. In Parton’s novel first verse, though, she creates a reporter character entering a jail cell to obtain the killer’s story. The rest of the song proceeds along familiar lines, now with an “as told to” quality. For me, this move drains emotional force from the song by separating the singer and the killer by a step. In interviews, Parton explained her decision as a feminist move. Fair enough, although others have found different, more effective strategies to address this concern. Her version may survive as homily, but not as catharsis.

Almost all versions of “The Unfortunate Rake,” including “Pills of White Mercury,” start with a similar “framing” narrator to the one Parton invents in “Banks.”  For some reason, I don’t have the same nagging resentment of this framing move in “Rake” as I do with Parton’s invention in “Banks.” Perhaps this is because it has always been part of the song. The comparison, though, led me to think about how “Rake” is not told, and how the song might feel different to the singer or affect the listener differently if it were a direct, first-person confession by the victim. The difference is that the song achieves its homiletic purpose primarily by inviting us to pity the protagonist, but does not invite us as strongly to identify with him. This contrasts with the more directly confessional style of murder ballads (such as “Knoxville Girl”).

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