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Mutation & Metaphor

Photo by Cindy Hunter Morgan

York imagines Charlie and Ira performing their way into something no longer imagined but real. The poem depends on mutation and metaphor. York must conjure Charlie and Ira Louvin. He must enter them to enter this poem, as Charlie and Ira Louvin had to imagine the Knoxville Girl’s killer and inhabit the killer’s mind and heart when they sang. This dynamic is not unique to York and the Louvins. In fact, the oddity and necessity of it crop up frequently in other Murder Ballad Monday posts.

In his own way, York is “covering” the song, and the poem as cover serves to reactivate the past. York was interested in this sort of reactivation and wrote about it in an essay, “Recovery: Learning the Music of History.” In that essay, York writes that listening to some covers “is to read for both fidelity and disregard and to puzzle the value of the amplification or diminishment of a song’s historic qualities.” He also writes specifically about BR5-49’s cover of “Knoxville Girl,” which York believed was a cover of the Louvin Brothers’ version of the song, though not an exact repetition of it. York asserts that BR5-49’s cover is more meaningful if we know its provenance, and his comparison of the BR5-49 version with the Louvin Brothers’ version is smart. I won’t summarize what York finds in the supplements and subtractions, but I recommend the essay.

York crafts his own supplements and subtractions in his poem. He shows the killers (plural) whittling “that driftwood branch / they’ll use to strike that fair girl down” and he never mentions the murderer’s mother. The whittling is a meaningful addition. It slows the action and suggests a kind of willful deliberation, and it makes an artful, clever connection between the whittling of the stick and the whippings the Louvin Brothers received as children (more on that later).

York’s poem, like the Louvin Brothers’ version of the song, begins innocently enough, even sweetly, with a line of iambic tetrameter, “The song is one their mother sang.” Maybe the use of meter is a nod to history and to the English roots of the song, but this poem should not be confused with, say, Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepard to His Love.” This poem, like the song, swerves away from amiability. The song, of course, shifts abruptly. By the end of the second verse, the fair girl is knocked down with a stone. York sustains nostalgia for three full stanzas before the direct, foreboding first line of the fourth stanza, “But this is not a hymn.” The end-stopped line gives the reader time to absorb the corrective tone of this statement. It also signals the beginning of what will become a greater psychic shift.

Psychic Distance

In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes about the importance of proper psychic distance. By psychic distance he means “the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story.” For our purposes here, I use it to mean both the distance the speaker feels between himself and the events of the poem, and the distance the performers might feel between themselves and the events about which they sing. York’s poem manipulates psychic distance. By the end, we’ve moved from “The song is one their mother sang” to a nearly erased border between the Louvin Brothers and the Knoxville Girl’s killer.

The progression is gradual, and a line in the third stanza signals the beginning of it. York writes, “their voices twine, almost one,” a move that suggests the brothers (plural) are becoming the “I” of the song, which is to say, the killer. In the fourth stanza, the brothers/musicians become something more than performers: “they walk the riverside, whittling / smooth that driftwood branch / they’ll use to strike that fair girl down.” (Note: York uses italics to show those song passages he’s quoting directly.)

The switch in the pronoun from the expected, singular “I” or “he” of the killer to the use of “they” is an intriguing slip, a quiet move that could escape notice. York’s third stanza quotes the song, “I met a little girl in Knoxville,” but the “I” of the song doesn’t last. After the voices of the Louvin Brothers “twine, almost one,” the rest of the poem reveals the brothers’ inevitable descent into the song. The song swallows them until, by entering it and singing it, they too are complicit. The psychic distance shrinks.

In the fifth stanza, York uses a simile to extend an image. That image allows York to reveal truth without explanation: “dark eyes twinkling / like the river in the wind / as they only beat her more.” Here the girl’s eyes are compared to a river even before she’s grabbed and dragged and thrown into the water. It’s an imagistic death if not yet a real one, and the comparison is important for the suggestion it makes: the girl’s life might end in the river, but the end begins in her eyes.

By the second-to-last stanza, the girl is dead, the killers are in a cinder-block cell, and “Sweat gleams on the guitar’s face.” Here it’s not just the Louvin brothers who are hot with song, not just the killer sweating from lust, madness, and guilt. Here the guitar, instrument of communication, is given a face, and the face gleams with sweat. It’s a wonderful use of personification. “Ira holds the chord in the mandolin / till the wood is still.” With this image, York offers a beautiful simultaneity: Ira is both killer (a man who holds down something until it suffocates, until “the wood is still”) and comforter (a man so gentle he can sooth his own music into sleep). The multiple, simultaneous possibilities of these two lines are a measure of York’s craft.

Photo by Cindy Hunter Morgan

Later, York writes, “They wait as the tape rolls out, / smoothing like a stream to hold / sky’s last light.” The reappearance of the tape, which began rolling in the second stanza, is perhaps some acknowledgement that all of this was in fact performance. But the poem isn’t over. The Louvins wait “till she’s still and quiet / as a lullaby child.” By the end of York’s poem, the Louvins – in the sweat and absorption of their music – have killed the girl, and Ira’s mandolin has become a kind of coffin, a vessel not only of music but also of silence.

Of course, all of this is artful blurring, not forceful rhetoric. York uses the word “lullaby” in the first stanza, and when he uses it again in the last stanza, we hear the similarity and the mutation. The simile at the end of his poem, “till she’s still and quiet / as a lullaby child,” establishes a comparison between the dead girl of the song (and the poem) and the young Louvins of York’s first stanza. And yet, in York’s poem, it is the adult Louvins who have killed/lulled the girl, so the mutation is a double mutation (or more): they morph not only into killers but also into lullers, the figure of their own mother. Does this mean, by some logic of geometry, that York aligns the girl’s killer(s) with the Ira and Charlie’s mother? Maybe I’m taking the math too far here, but maybe not.

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