A Metahistory Of The Murder Ballad
How songs about men killing their sweethearts have changed over the centuries
Songs about a “murdered sweetheart” have been popular fare since the early 17th century and the arrival of the English printing press. Popular songs were sold in the streets by people who sang them from the printed sheets for sale, a direct and human form of marketing.
The music itself was not printed. Rather, every song was arranged according to one of the melodies that were already popular in the streets. The printed lyric sheets were labeled with the tune used to sing them. Lyrics about a man murdering his lover were popular, for such tales were rare enough to be notable, but familiar enough to be universal.
What do Doc Watson, Jimi Hendrix, Maynard Keenan, and Chris Cornell have in common? They are all masters of the murder ballad. I make no excuse for murder, or the murder ballad. It simply happened, and thrives on the airwaves even now. Until the 20th century, these songs remained alive mainly as performance. In the usual way of the troubadour, musicians before and after the advent of recording technology gave these songs their own personal touches.
In the process, the history of the ‘murder ballad’ becomes not an objective, straightforward, or scientific reconstruction of the past. It is instead a history of the poetic act, a process shaped by the performers acting as custodians of the song, using imagination and language to effect moral and aesthetic choices. It is what historian Hayden White calls a “metahistory”.
A song that never dies
Artists did not ‘discover’ or ‘reflect’ a ready-made meaning from the past in the murder ballad. Instead, they created new narratives of the sweetheart murder from a raw chronicle of events, fictional or real. For example, London-based music historian Paul Slade writes that the song “Pretty Polly” traces back to an original he has found in “the British Library’s Roxburghe Collection printed between 1567 and 1790”, most likely some time in the mid-1700s, that uses 136 lines in 34 verses to tell the story.
Today’s average popular song has two verses and eight original lines. So consider this stripped-down, electrified version of “Pretty Polly” by Creech Holler, a now-defunct band in the ‘southern gothic’ subgenre from the first decade of the 21st century. Walking bass and drums become ominous, distorted vocals add menace, yet the words Jeff Zentner has chosen are hundreds of years old. The track is less than four minutes long, far shorter than its most distant ancestor, and still unusual in its time for having two dozen lines. Stripped down with G minor tuning, this ancient murder ballad succeeds as a natural ‘story song’ from the dirty south.
Zentner chooses to sing of “her lily white hands”. He chooses to sing that Polly “fell asleep” without describing the mode of her death. “William” has been a generic name in murder ballads since the 18th century. Zentner’s William “used to be a rambler” and complains that “such a lovely was never found”, suggesting a motive without giving us any details. Mystery adds to the atmosphere of creep and dread.
The centerpiece of the Creech Holler version is the ride through the forest, Polly seeing the grave and the shovel, and expressing her fear of Willie (“I’m afraid of your ways”). Consistent with the rest of the two albums produced by Creech Holler, With Signs Following in 2006 and The Shovel and the Gun in 2008, the mood is southern horror and haunted humans. The track pairs favorably with “Lester Ballard”, a song inspired by the violent main character in Cormac McCarthy’s dark and disturbing 1973 novel Child of God. “Oh, Lester Ballard, whatcha do last night, did you roam the hills and hollers till the broad daylight?” presents the mystery in the question. The common theme is personal, inexplicable motive.
To repeat: this creativity is achieved primarily by lyrical subtraction. “In murder ballads, the magic is the mystery, the parts left unsaid,” Rennie Sparks writes.1 “Like the wordless, unspeakable parts of our own psyche, murder ballads hold secrets that loom larger the farther down they’re pushed. The more holes we cut in these songs, the more powerful they become.” It works because the deep poetic and linguistic structure of the original endures in the performance.
Hayden White calls this the “metahistorical” layer. In his 1973 book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White examines his subject as literature, that is, prose discourse in text, and argues that historians present us with stories — narratives — that are “emplotted”, explained, and ideologically framed for the reader.2 As with postmodernism, claims of pure scientific objectivity are illusory, White says. “Pretty Polly” is not a forensic examination, or a courtroom confession for the record. It is a musical mystery that leaves the audience wanting more.
Cycles of creative reconstruction
Then there are subtle additions, choices, and changes. In some versions, Polly begs for her life. Slade writes that The Stanley Brothers “were the first artists to have Polly beg ‘let me be a single girl if I can’t be your wife’, but that plea’s been echoed by Judy Collins in 1968, Patty Loveless in 1997 and many others besides.” During the 19th century, someone decided to add a moral to the story by having William undergo trial and execution, giving us the song with her name.
“It’s possible that this change appeared as early as 1805, but the earliest concrete example I’ve been able to find is a Liverpool sheet produced around 1822”, Slade writes. “This retitles the ballad Love and Murder, cuts it to just 44 lines, and sets its action in the English town of Worcester. The story is just as we know it, but the girl’s name has now morphed from Molly to Polly.” Until then, the name ‘Molly’ had been the generic match to ‘William’ in a series of variations on a song known to folk musicians as “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter”, originally “The Gosport Tragedy”.
As performed by Jackie Oates in this 2006 recording, “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter” becomes a fireside ghost story. Rather than hypnotic sound as with Creech Holler, the instruments are sparse, almost a chamber music performance, and all recorded by Oates herself. Longer, with 32 non-repeating lines that barely differ from Mike Waterson’s 1977 version, it is “Gosport Tragedy” delivered with clarity and emotional weight. We learn that William has killed Molly because she was pregnant with his child. Oates includes the mode of death, the knife repeatedly stabbing poor Molly. Her ghost is the mystery, a supernatural visitation appearing at the end to avenge her and her unborn baby.
The ghost story is original to the “Gosport Tragedy” (Roud Folk Song Index 15, George Malcolm Laws P36). William, the eponymous ship’s carpenter, encounters the ghost of Molly and dies a horrible, supernatural death. This sort of narrative outcome is quite common in what I will gently call ‘fake news’ pamphlets from the English Civil War era that I have read in the Thomason Tracts, so it is hardly surprising that English sailors would still be telling similar spooky stories a century later. From the original:
As he was running from the captain with speed,
He met with his Polly which made his heart bleed,
She stripped him and tore him, she tore him in three,
Because that he murdered her baby and she.
The ship’s captain delivers a key line that the ship is “in mourning and cannot sail on” because of the unavenged murder. Superstition at the time did in fact hold that sailing with a murderer on board put the entire ship and crew in danger. This is the underlying metaphor of another famous text published in 1797, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who used an albatross as the victim of the narrator. During the 19th century, however, murder ballads shifted from metaphysical vengeance to systems of justice. The poets were incorporating changes to their world.
Modernity and the murder ballad
Here is the late, great Doc Watson performing “Tom Dooley”, classified as “Roud 4192” in the folk song index of that name. Based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the killer’s name, Tom Dula, was pronounced Dooley, it is considered a classic of the genre. Given his ‘last goodnight’, Tom denies his guilt, but the song does not believe him, excuse him, or forgive him. He is “bound to die” by hanging tomorrow morning, with or without the peace of confession. The state has taken over these duties from the vengeful ghost.
Tom Pettit observes that the murder ballad genre neatly divides into two clear subtypes on this point. Twenty examples in his survey involve a “judicial sequel” of legal process — the arrest, conviction, and imminent execution by hanging are described, even if the trial process is normally elided.3 In the remaining four examples Pettit found, the killer “is destroyed by less institutional forces such as pangs of remorse or her vengeful spirit”.
Moreover, the Victorian Age stressed moral lessons, not simply to wayward women (“before we get married, some pleasures to see”) but young men. “The ballads are ‘about’ the dangers to young men in a culture where young women are both socially accessible and potentially amenable to seduction, at least on a plausible promise of marriage”, Pettit writes. “The murdered sweetheart ballads seem to have been part of the way a culture, accustomed for centuries to cruel lady who said no, came to terms with the pretty girl who said yes.”
Sexual mores would play an increasing role in the performance of the murder ballad as it crossed the Atlantic. According to law professor Richard H. Underwood, the real Tom Dula was a womanizer who contracted syphilis and killed the woman he believed had given it to him. The implications are obvious, and they bear on interpretations of “Pretty Polly” by its performers.
“By avoiding any hint that Willie’s victim was pregnant, the American song removes all clues to his motive for killing her, and so denies us the chance to neatly rationalise his crime away”, Slade notes of the transition. “In the American song, Willie kills for no reason at all, and seems to consider it a trivial act. That makes him a far scarier figure than his English ancestor” who dies at the hands of Molly’s ghost.
