"1st Shot Got Him" by The Washboard Chaz Blues Trio
In the days following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Algiers resident Henry Glover was shot in the chest by a rookie policeman. The attack was allegedly unprovoked, and Glover was able to escape despite his injuries. Later, a friend took him for help, and SWAT officers found them and beat them, and Glover died from his wounds. In an effort to conceal the act, police placed Glover's corpse in an abandoned vehicle and set fire to it. In 2010, five officers were found guilty of this crime. Washboard Chaz, a prolific New Orleans musician, tells this story to the beat of his namesake instrument.Another murderous Willy, this time leading his lover down to the river to propose to her. He is rebuffed and does not take it so well, slicing her throat with a knife and then, as she pleads for mercy, throws her into the river to drown. The next day, he's visited by the Sheriff who asks him to accompany him to the crime scene. Other versions reference the banks of the PeeDee River, which would lend another Carolina location.
Mack the Knife's origins lie in the lyrics of Bertolt Brecht's composition, "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" for The Threepenny Opera. This tale recounts the bloody exploits of Mack, who unflinchingly amasses quite a body count. The entire last verse is but a list of women who've met their end at Mack's knife.
The story of Naomi "Little Omie" Wise could very well be the historic inspiration for "The Banks of the Ohio." Omie was a girl growing up in Randolph County, North Carolina, and courting a young man, John Lewis. According to local lore, Omie got pregnant and John looked to take care of it in secrecy by luring her out of town. Locals first reported her missing in April 1808, and they found her body in an Asheboro river. Officials apprehended Lewis, but he escaped and later, when he was re-tried, it was for the escape and not for Omie's murder. Scott H Biram, "the dirty one-man band" from Texas offers an honest rendition of this story.
"Lethal Injection" by The Blackstone Valley Sinners
Set to the haunting vocals of BVS, "Lethal Injection" is the story of a man who kills his wife's adulterous lover in a Motel Six and awaits on Death Row. Much in the same vein of Bessie Smith's "'Lectric Chair," the protagonist of this murder ballad is aware that he is beyond redemption and, although he respects the intention of the priest trying to save his soul before his punishment, he knows the efforts are in vain.
Murder ballads are not always restricted to small town crimes. Like "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Jesse James," the songs can detail characters in the news that are more accessible to larger groups. In the case of Charles Whitman, the song assists to make sense of a tragedy with a dose of humor. Kinky Friedman, singer-comedian and former Texas gubernatorial candidate, details the tragedy at the University of Texas when, in 1966, Whitman climbed to the top of the university's administration tower with a sniper rifle and indiscriminately fired on the busy campus below, killing 16 and injuring 32. Friedman alludes to the speculation about a cancerous tumor causing the instability of an otherwise model citizen as well as the aftermath, but his tongue-in-cheek approach to this particular story was met with protest and anger during live performances in Austin.
The black neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia -- Yamacraw -- provides the setting for the murder of Delia Green by Cooney Houston, both fourteen, in 1900. The story made the usual rounds through the South, changing here and there, before Johnny Cash's anachronistic version. Cash, himself a "murder balladeer," takes his sweet time killing Delia, but in the end is haunted by his actions and her ghost.
In 1996, Roderick Ferrell and a pack of kids from Kentucky dubbed "The Vampire Clan" drove down to Florida to recruit "the Wendorf girl" into their club and decided to kill her parents. First they clubbed her father with a crowbar -- a clawhammer -- then stabbed her mother to death. He left his mark --the letter V -- in the father's head with a cigarette. Colonel JD Wilkes, one of the South's premier ambassadors, relays this story accompanied by Th' Shack Shaker's own WMD's: hypnotic bass, swampy guitars, haunting banjo and a harmonica straight from Hell.
Another version of the murder ballad as love song, and perhaps the best personification of such. The first-person account of a jilted, yet quite codependent lover is chilling. The icy lyrics counterbalance the soft, velvet pitch of Nelson's voice and the hypnotic beat of his trusty guitar. The killer's narration in this song makes it difficult to sympathize with the victim, despite the horror of the subject matter. This version of the song is made all the better due to the reactions from the crowd at the performance.
It is rare in the murder ballad for the voice of the song to belong to the victim, and in Dylan's "Seven Curses," this leads to fogging things up a bit. Old Reilly, a horse thief, is sentenced to hang, and a deal between the judge and Reilly's daughter goes awry, leading to the angry seven curses. The weight of Dylan's brilliant lyricisms are perhaps the only vehicles on the planet with the strength to shoulder the disgust and horror at the true crime in the song, and the fact that the true killers are not the criminals, but the law, make the song even more relevant.
Brutus, reviled by Dante only to see exoneration and exaltation by Shakespeare centuries later,shares a lot in common with Robert Ford. Ford, known throughout the West as "The Coward," shot Jesse James, a modern-day Robin Hood of Missouri, in the back as he straightened a picture frame. Ford lived the rest of his life facing the disgust of the people until a gunman shot him down, allegedly in retaliation for James. His infamy continued after his death, as Woody Guthrie and others sang "Jesse James," the song that chastises the man who "ate of Jesse's bread and slept in Jesse's bed / then laid poor Jesse in his grave." Decades later, Patrick Phelan of Luego takes a different view. "If the papers get it right," everyone should now realize that Ford acted in self-defense, because if "I didn't do it, he'd a-killed me tonight."
The murder ballad's origins can be traced back to Old World Europe. Just as "Mack the Knife" originated in Germany, many songs immigrated across the Atlantic with scores of cultures and traditions in the late nineteenth century. One of these songs is known as "Pretty Polly," originally known as "The Gosport Tragedy" or "The Cruel Ship's Carpenter" overseas. Most versions detail a man luring a woman to the woods as she pleads for mercy before he kills her and deposits her into a shallow grave. Nirvana's "Polly" continues this tradition with a first-person, emotionless account that effectively transports the listener to that horrible scene as we hear her pleas go unheard by her sadistic killer.
