“Willie Moore”
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| Leonard Rutherford (fiddle) and Dick Burnett (banjo) – Theirs is the earliest known recording of “Willie Moore” |
Introduction
One thing I find about murder ballads in my own life is that I often remember the first time and place I hear one, or at least I remember the time I first parse one and realize what it’s about. “Duncan and Brady“, “Down in the Willow Garden“, “Excitable Boy“, “Matty Groves” – in these cases and more, I specifically recall details of the moment; where I was, who I was with, the album cover or the performer’s face, and so forth.
Why is that? I think the answer to that question intersects rather fully with the answer to the question new readers often have when they hit our blog – why write about murder ballads? Our definition of the genre is rather broad, but we want it that way because we are “looking to find expression for that ineffable feeling you get when you hear a ballad that forces you to peer in to the mysteries of life and death.” It’s that feeling, I think, that makes my first moments of understanding a given murder ballad so memorable.
Such was certainly the case for me with our ballad of choice today, “Willie Moore.” I was a senior in college, and a Resident Assistant for a bunch of houses and apartments on a street away from the traditional dorms. One of my new friends in the political science house made me a mixed tape late that fall. One evening at dusk I listened to it on the cassette deck in my car as I drove in to town to spend the evening with good friends at our local watering hole. I remember being moved immediately by Happy Traum, both by his instrumental performance and his delivery of the lyrics of the ballad.
I want to start you off quickly today with that particular track, before we get in to any of the research or analysis. Though it’s not a traditional performance, it’s just lovely and I can think of no better way to start this particular post.
Willie Moore was a king, his age twenty-one,
He courted a damsel fair;
O, her eyes was as bright as the diamonds every night,
And wavy black was her hair.
He courted her both night and day,
‘Til to marry they did agree;
But when he came to get her parents consent,
They said it could never be.
She threw herself in Willie Moore’s arms,
But little did he think when they parted that night,
Sweet Anna he would see no more.
It was about the tenth of May,
The time I remember well;
That very same night, her body disappeared
In a way no tongue could tell.
Had friends most all around;
And in a little brook before the cottage door,
The body of sweet Anna was found.
And there she was dressed in a gown of snowy white,
And laid her in a lonely tomb.
And in a grassy mound before the cottage door,
The body of sweet Anna still sleeps.
Willie Moore never spoke that anyone heard,
And at length from his friends did part,
And the last heard from him, he’d gone to Montreal,
Where he died of a broken heart.
This song was composed in the flowery West
By a man you may never have seen;
O, I’ll tell you his name, but it is not in full,
His initials are J.R.D.
“Willie Moore was a king…”
I’m certainly not the first to explore this ballad online. In addition to the comments in the lyrics page linked above, you can find other examples here, here, and here. Now, while much of what I’m about to discuss is more or less covered in those other pages, I will say I arrived independently at many of these conclusions years ago. That’s not saying much; it’s not a particularly complicated narrative, though it seems a bit veiled in some ways. As well, because I’ve used this song in middle and high school classrooms since my days as a student teacher, I’ve heard dozens of key questions regarding the lyrics, so I’ve benefited from others’ confusion for over a decade.
Several things have become clear to me. Willie is not royalty, he’s just a proper young man. He’s likely not even wealthy, in that courting a country girl living in her parents’ cottage is not something you’d expect from such a man. If he was wealthy, it’s hard to grasp why Annie’s parents would reject his perfectly respectful advances. No, he’s a ‘king’ – a fine young man, a stand up guy who’s doing everything right. He courts properly and does right by Annie and her parents. I think that’s a key to the song, because it’s plain to see that this story isn’t really about Willie, and the moral wouldn’t work if Willie was anything but impeccable.
Annie is likewise upright. She doesn’t simply give in to Willie – he has to court her “night and day” before she agrees to marry, though she presumably found him attractive from the start. And, while the lyrics make clear that she spent a good deal of time in his arms, there is absolutely no intimation of physical impropriety. Some might argue that she is pregnant and that it’s just not spoken in the ballad. But we have scores of songs that involve such things, and whether they beat around the bush about it or say it straight up, whether they sympathize with the girl or judge her, those songs almost always serve as a clearly stated warning against promiscuity. That’s just *not* part of this song. It isn’t about Annie’s actions.
Well, let me qualify that. One of her actions is the key to making this song work as a murder ballad, as you’ll see in a moment.
But even that one act isn’t exactly the subject of the song. No, this is a ballad that makes its target the unfair control of parents. Willie and Annie are young but adult enough. They love each other and they do everything right, up to and including Willie’s asking Annie’s parents for her hand. But they reject him. We don’t even get to know why, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve had teenagers in my classes react viscerally in anger to this aspect of the song. I think that’s *precisely* the response it’s meant to evoke, in young and old alike. “Good God! How could they?”
Annie’s death, though, is the most confusing part to my students. They realize clearly that Willie wouldn’t have done it, and neither would her parents despite their effort to control her completely. Sooner or later someone gets it every time – “her body disappeared in a way no tongue can tell”- Annie killed herself. This is clear as soon as you understand that the song has the sharpest possible point, and it’s thrust squarely at Annie’s (and all) unfair parents. There’s just no doubt that she died by her own hand.
A few versions of the song, such as that made popular by Joan Baez as well as one found in the Max Hunter Folk Song Collection from 1958, add Annie’s response to her parents, and this verse makes her impending suicide explicit.
Even without this more explicit verse, though, the suicide is obvious. Her parents are “left alone” to deal with the consequences of their old-fashioned, controlling ways. David J. Cantor observes rightly in one of the articles linked above that the song “lays responsibility for Anne’s death literally at her parents’ door”, her body being discovered in the water nearby and then buried by their home.
Willie and Annie did it all properly, but her parents still rejected him. What else could Annie do? Often my students will say things like “Why didn’t they run away and just get married anyway?” Well, my students have the benefit of growing up in a society that no longer easily accepts the absolute control of parents over children, and particularly over daughters. I usually quote them the first lines of “The Wagoner’s Lad” to illustrate how different 19th century America was from the one in which we live.
Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind
They’re always controlled, they’re always confined
Controlled by their parents until they are wives
then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.
Annie is as impeccable as Willie, and the narrative needs them to be that way. There’s no premarital intimacy, and there will certainly be no running off together. Willie doesn’t ask and Annie doesn’t suggest it. The answer they get from her parents is clear – their marriage “never can be.” Annie is who she is, a dutiful daughter; and so she does what she feels she must do in the face of what seems like the end of any chance for happiness in her life.
The last two verses of the full lyrics above tend not to appear together, though the penultimate one is more common today. Willie takes to rambling and goes far away, given what seems to be the Appalachian origin of this song, then dies of a broken heart. There can be little doubt of the expected emotional evocation. The listener is supposed to imagine Annie’s parents spending their remaining days in mourning, asking every day “Good Lord, what have we wrought?”
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| Mourning Picture – Edwin Romanzo Elmer, oil on canvas, 1890 – Smith College Museum of Art |
“Sweet Annie was loved both far and near…”
Happy Traum and Joan Baez are both Baby Boomers, and so it’s no great stretch to assert that their affinity for a song that stands squarely against old-fashioned inflexibility on the part of controlling parents might have something to do with their own generation’s rebellion against such power. However, as I’ve already hinted, this is probably not a 20th century song. That case is not ironclad, by any means. But unfair parental authority is obviously not a new theme in Western song and literature and, though this song’s origins are shrouded in more mystery than usual for the murder ballads we cover, what we can know about it suggests roots in post-bellum 19th century Appalachia. One can imagine it functioning in a similar manner to “The Diver Boy“, with which it shares more than a bit of common thematic ground.
But before we get to all that, let’s nail down when it began to spread in the 20th century.
The earliest known instance of this song is a recording from November 3, 1927, cut in Atlanta for Columbia Records by the seminal Kentucky fiddle and banjo duo Dick Burnett and Leonard Rutherford.
While Burnett and Rutherford’s recorded and live performances gained them genuine regional popularity before World War II, it was this particular recording’s inclusion by Harry Smith on his watershed Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952 that brought the ballad to the ears of a truly widespread American audience.
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| Liner notes for “Willie Moore” in Smith’s Anthology |
In the liner notes for the Anthology, Smith condenses the narrative in his typical way. He then notes a highly questionable story regarding an informant of Vance Randolph‘s who claimed to be *the* Willie Moore when Randolph was researching the ballad for his Ozark Folksongs, published immediately after World War II.
Everything about that story seems unreliable. While it makes for entertaining liner notes, it can’t possibly qualify as good scholarship. I don’t have Randolph’s book to check, but Waltz and Engle mention the story in their online database entry for the song, and add that the meeting was supposed to have taken place in 1936. Waltz dryly comments that he would “prefer documentation.”
Unfortunately, what solid information we do have doesn’t rise to particularly higher standards. No other major collector that I can find has cataloged the ballad. Still, there are a few entries that give us some hints in the Roud Folksong Index, where “Willie Moore” is identified as Roud #4816, with 16 citations. Those citations identify other traditional performers having sung the song for collectors, though all after Burnett and Rutherford’s recording was released.
They are as follows, colored from red (oldest) to indigo (latest)
Burnett and Rutherford’s home town, Monticello, Kentucky, 1927
Alice Begley in Middlefork, Kentucky in 1937
Ruth Clark Cullipher in Mullins, South Carolina in 1937
Nellie Hamilton in Wise, Virginia ca. 1940
Fred Starr in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1941
David Krussel in Turner’s Station, Missouri in 1975
Delta Hicks in Tinchtown, Tennessee in 1978
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What does this tell us about the ballad’s provenance? Nothing definitive, but if we combine it with the understanding that the lyrics of every variant I can find are quite similar, we might be able to make an educated guess or two.
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| Vance Randolph |
On the other hand, if this is a 19th century composition as I suspect, there’s precious little evidence to prove it. What exists is circumstantial. Certainly, the push back against traditional parental authority and the theme of suicide fit in 19th century America, but they fit elsewhere in American history as well. And as I said, the lyrics of every performance we know admit of little variation. There was not much time for this ballad to break out of its original source bottleneck before it became fixed in recorded music in 1927.
Honor boys, honor, honor don’t you know
War is ragin’, you’re all a-bound to go
I’d rather be a Union man and carry a wooden gun
Than to be a Rebel and always have to run
“…a time I remember well…”
I’ll sample the best of those modern folk performances in a short second post later this week. There are plenty! But, now that we’re done with the provenance as far as we can be, there’s one more performance I want to consider today.
Doc Watson released at least three versions of this ballad. He first recorded it among many tracks he made with Clarence Ashley from 1960 – 1962, but that track only featured Doc playing the banjo and singing with Gaither Carlton backing him on the fiddle. It was unreleased until 1994’s Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962, and the liner notes do little to nail down whether Doc knew the song from local tradition or from Burnett and Rutherford. The latter is likely, though he doesn’t sing their last verse – but it doesn’t really matter. Doc also released it, accompanied by his son Merle, on the album Ballads from Deep Gap in 1967, though the liner notes there again only reference the 1927 recording.
However, he had joined forces earlier with Jean Ritchie on stage at Folk City, and parts of that concert were released in 1963 as Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City. Though performed solo by Doc, “Willie Moore” made it on to that album, and Smithsonian Folkways reissued it in 1990. The following year I picked it up on cassette and, in that same car I mentioned earlier, on the way home from the record store I first heard this track that I thought I knew but had never heard done in the traditional way (well, except for that harmonica.) It blew me away. It still does.
Something about the way Doc delivers here makes the horror of this song hit home. When you hear Doc sing it, you *know* it’s a murder ballad.
Coda
It’s worth noting that, with this post, we here at Murder Ballad Monday have finally fully crossed in to a new realm – suicide. We’ve bumped up against it more than a few times, but we made a conscious choice to avoid taking it head on in our first year, until we felt steady enough to handle it appropriately.
The sad fact of the matter is that we’re all much more likely to have been touched by this sort of purposeful taking of human life than any other, and so we were concerned (and still are) that songs like this one might hit home for many of you in ways that other murder ballads might not.
But, we’re here for the music and for the truth, and so to ignore this theme when it fits squarely within our genre of choice would be a round disservice. That means we’ll be back here again, sooner or later. When we do come back, please remember – we write about beautiful music that often deals with terrible things and, as with every post, we hope that such beauty is what moves you primarily and as deeply as it does us.