It’s easy to say that the murder ballad today is obsolete, and that those of us obsessed with the genre are like those odd people on Antiques Roadshow that know a whole lot about certain picky sorts of old stuff mysterious to most.  (Aw, who am I kidding?  Usually when I tell someone I like murder ballads, I see that same old reaction in their eyes – “ok, that’s weird.”)


Anyway, “Omie Wise” belongs to a different age, and now stories like hers (repeated endlessly it seems) are told in the papers, on TV news, and more creatively in the fiction of police and law dramas.  Traditional murder ballads live on today mostly among groups of people exposed to them through artists’ recordings – through media, not through families as part of a folk tradition.


But, let’s not get crazy with our sweeping generalizations here.  Who’s to say that a tradition nourished by the talent of an artistic elite and the virility of electronic media is somehow less able to reveal truth than one driven by the folk and diffused through oral tradition?  Of course they aren’t identical.  But can’t we see them as interrelated?


To get to the point, we’ve proven here that we can *certainly* access the psychological power of the traditional genre without adhering to the strict traditional structure.  Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Neko Case, Neil Young, Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, Woody Guthrie; we’ve considered with all of these artists original 20th and 21st century compositions which can be called murder ballads if one frees oneself from a strict structural definition.  And we haven’t even looked at rap music yet!  


Now, I enjoy digging about for historical clues in the deep tradition as much as anyone – but one cannot know this tree by studying only its roots or its trunk.  If you’ll allow the simplistic metaphor, climbing to get into the high branches is a fun way to know it too.  Maybe that’s where we are with the genre today; up among the leaves in the breeze, resting comfortably on a deeply planted foundation.


Oh well, maybe you don’t buy it.  That’s ok too.  Either way, this week I want to go out on another limb – it’s summer and, for me right now, climbing is where the fun is.


“Enjoy every sandwich.”


Warren Zevon would not have looked at you funny just because you told him you were ‘into murder ballads.’ He had expansive musical tastes and a mind that could encompass all sorts of things folks think are ‘weird’.  A prolific and gifted musician and songwriter (arguably one of the best in Rock and Roll), and an incredibly intelligent and troubled human being, he was well-versed in folk and classic Country and Western music but was not particularly an interpreter of the traditional murder ballad.  Still, his original compositions can hit ‘that place’ as surely as does “Omie Wise” – albeit for different reasons and in a decidedly less solemn way.


I had the thought recently after re-watching The Power of Myth that Warren as an artist was like the “trickster” in the mythological tales of so many cultures – in exploring the depth of the human experience, he clowned and thumbed his nose at the rules while still taking the deep truth of it all quite seriously. He often brought us to that “sunny dark place” laughing instead of crying.  But, he brought us.


In his biography, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, one story gave me particular insight into this.  When Warren was nine in the mid-1950’s, his father ‘Stumpy’ (essentially by then a gangster) visited his estranged wife and son on Christmas Eve in Fresno, then disappeared to go play poker.  He returned Christmas morning with a piano that he’d won in the game for Warren.  Warren wanted the piano badly, but his mother angrily demanded that Stumpy take the “headache machine” away.  In the ensuing fight, Stumpy grabbed the carving knife set out for the turkey meal.  

“It was the chilling image of Stumpy’s poker face as he hurled the knife at Beverly’s head that made a lasting impression on Warren. Time stood still as he watched the lethal blade miss his mother’s head by no more than an inch.”

Too much of the real world too fast I suppose; but for a kid with the highest documented IQ of nearly any in southern California, such experiences were bound to leave marks in diverse aspects of his life – certainly in his creative voice.   We’ll get to that in a minute.


First though, for those of you who don’t know the end of his story, Warren Zevon was diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma in August of 2002, and died just over a year later on September 7, 2003.  He went through several phases in that final year, some quite dark – but he saw his twin grandsons born, managed to write and record a final album, let VH1 document his last months, and spent a truly unique evening with his good friend David Letterman on The Late Show.  I watched it when it aired, and I’m so glad to be able to share a bit of it with you from YouTube. Within two minutes of opening their discussion, you can see in his perspective on his own life what he evokes regarding death in his songs.  He’s not just putting on a brave face; it’s the way he learned to see it all.  (If you think it’s an act, watch it all; or just skip ahead to around 6:55 and watch and listen to him as he answers Dave’s question.)

So, let’s get to the music.  There are several examples that will give us a week’s worth of posts, but I want to start with some of his early songs today.  You’ve probably rarely if ever heard them on the radio, but it’s writing like this that earned Warren the respect and friendship of numerous talented artists through the years.


“She ain’t gonna cheat on me…”


Warren’s career did not exactly get off to a flying start.  He produced his first album, Wanted Dead or Alive, in 1969 and it was released in 1970 “to the sound of one hand clapping” as he wryly lamented.  But the album has since been re-released and, despite its unevenness as a set, we can go back to see the germinating seeds of his brilliant songwriting.  With regards to murder ballads, Warren penned one with Paul Evans that he included on that album – “A Bullet for Ramona”, in the style of the classic Country and Western songs that he grew to love.

Now, one could understandably claim that this is pastiche balladry.  But I think there’s more going on here.  The song is a window into Warren’s notorious jealous side.  While the narrative is obvious fiction, the psychology behind it is something well-documented and that came out acutely during his infamous alcohol-fueled rages.  I don’t pretend that is something to celebrate – but for an artist, it’s certainly evocative. The story is too well written for it to be a joke, even if it makes you want to laugh. 


I don’t mean for a second that I believe Warren *meant* for it to be deeply personal.  Likewise, I don’t think it’s meant to be a caricature.  I expect that he didn’t mean anything other than to write what happened to be coming out of him at the moment and then to make sure it was a good song.   We’ve seen this before in this blog with Townes Van Zandt and Neil Young particularly, and it may be one of the great differences between the traditional ballads and those of these contemporary artists.  It doesn’t diminish, to my mind at least, the power of their work.

“It was over in Clay County…”


Warren’s critically acclaimed 1976 eponymous album, produced by his steadfast supporter Jackson Browne, opens strongly with a wonderful ballad he’d written half a decade earlier.  It’s as much an outlaw ballad as murder ballad, but the subject has also come up in this blog before – “Frank and Jesse James.”  Warren at times turned to history for inspiration, and this early example shines as one of his best songs.