“Unprepared to Die”: An Interview with Paul Slade
<<<Back to page 1
MBM: Why do you focus primarily on American murder ballads?
PS: Well, first of all, those were the murder ballads that I knew. When I first discovered murder ballads, I thought of them as a very American type of song. I’ve always loved American popular culture. I assumed this was an American genre. Going back to this Punk ethos, I thought: ”Which songs would I want to read about?” They’ve got to be the ones I’m genuinely fascinated by myself.
Once PlanetSlade got under way, I began to understand just how deeply songs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” are rooted in very old English songs. The imagery is almost identical, often the same rhyme schemes, even the same phrases make their way directly into the American songs. Once I understood that, I realized there was always going to be a very substantial British angle to these essays, even though they were discussing what were, on the surface, entirely American songs.
Rennie Sparks
(photo by Jason Creps, 2012)
The genius of the American songs is the way they pare everything down to this absolute nub. Some of the British originals can go on for thirty verses or more. I spoke to Rennie Sparks about this issue for the book. What the Americans tend to do is strip away a lot of the extraneous information, they tell it in a much more compressed, but more resonant way. Somehow the stuff that they remove makes the song more fascinating, more mysterious. America’s puritan streak, for example, often tends to remove overt references to sex from the lyrics. But, as Rennie Sparks pointed out, the more you try to remove the sexual content from in a song like “Pretty Polly,” the more it makes itself felt.
MBM: Something similar happens with the supernatural elements when the songs come to America, like with “Demon Lover,”/”House Carpenter,” for example.
PS: That’s true. In the source song for “Pretty Polly,” which is called “The Gosport Tragedy,” Polly comes back as a ghost and exacts a terrible revenge on her killer – she actually tears him into three pieces. As you say, that element tends to get stripped out as you cross the Atlantic.
MBM: Tell me about your artist interviews. What were the main themes that emerged for you in talking with the musicians? Were there any surprises?
PS: Well, let’s take Billy Bragg. I talked to him about “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He’s repurposed those lyrics into a song of his own called “The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie,” about an American protestor killed by Israeli bulldozers on the Gaza Strip.
It turns out that the Dylan album that included “Hattie Carroll,” The Times They Are a-Changin’, was an absolutely pivotal album for Billy Bragg. It showed him how folk music could be used to make a moral point. He traded his copy of The Jackson 5’s Greatest Hits for the Dylan album. It was a key record in the formation of Billy Bragg as a musician; that album and that song in particular.
Talking to songwriters, you get a different understanding of the song. They can give you an insight into how the songs come together in the lyrics. Billy Bragg was terrific from that point of view. Rennie Sparks is incredibly quotable. She’s done a good bit of her own scholarly research into “Pretty Polly” too.
I also spoke to Mick Harvey, The Bad Seeds’ guitarist on Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads album. He was able to tell me how their version of “Stagger Lee” came together in the studio, and how all the pieces clicked into place.
Angela Correa made me laugh. She’s from a different generation, younger than some of these other people, so she didn’t have quite the same reverential attitude towards Dylan. When her partner in Les Shelleys introduced her to the lyrics for “Hattie Carroll,” her first reaction was “Hell’s bells! This song’s a wordy bastard!”
Laura Cantrell was a wonderful interviewee too. I met her in New York, when I was on my way down to North Carolina to research three songs there. I’d asked for the interview to discuss Laura’s own cover of “Poor Ellen Smith,” but as we talked I realized that she’d done some interesting work on that song’s original lyrics too.
MBM: Since you mentioned it, let’s talk about “Poor Ellen Smith,” if we might. You mentioned to me that you had made a new discovery with this one.
Cover of “American Mountain Songs” (1956) by Ethel Park Richardson
PS: It turns out that Laura is related to Ethel Park Richardson, who was a researcher into American folk and country music lyrics back in the 1920s. Richardson published a book that set out a fairly early version of “Poor Ellen Smith”’s lyrics, and that version got Laura very intrigued. The lyrics seemed to demonstrate a more writerly approach. They just didn’t read like something that had emerged from the folk process. Laura was quite intrigued by that, and she set me on the trail to find out more. Eventually, I did discover where those lyrics come from. They go back to just 14 months after Ellen’s death. It turns out that Laura was basically right, but not the way she thought she was. That’s one of the book’s little scoops, though, so if people want to know more I’m afraid they’ll have to buy a copy!