The Great American Murder Ballad

Oh interesting - thank you for sharing. I think I have heard of a podcast that did the same kind of thing... will circle back if I find it...

These stories are a way of keeping alive the memory of the victims.

In this case the (alleged) murderer was even tracked down and brought back for a second trial, years later. Songs can keep rage alive for a community.

They're great stories, and it's not strange at all.

Good article.

My reaction was also along these lines. They might be better called "domestic violence ballads". Perhaps the focus is on the perspective of the man because he's the one left alive in the end to lament his fate.

So great art can’t be made about trying to understand or illustrate the motives of murderers?

Haven't female murderers been treated about the same? I think it's more just people's fascinations with the motivations and feelings behind murder than some misogynistic stuff. To make that claim, you really would have to compare apples to apples. In ballads about female murderers, are the subjects treated differently? I can't really think of all that many, but in ones about Lizzie Borden, I don't recall any difference in focus or tone from the ones about male killers.

This is a good point, thanks for making it.

I thought of "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash as a counterexample since in that song the victim is a man, but then thought of "Cocaine Blues" by Cash which has a female victim. "Cocaine Blues" is mainly about drug use with the man killing his cheating wife treated as a minor detail.

I thought Cash wrote the song and so it wouldn't count as a murder ballad if we say murder ballads have to be folk songs, however it turns out Cash just did a famous cover of the song written by T. J. "Red" Arnall and recorded by Arnall probably in 1947 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Blues, which was in turn based on an American folk song "Little Sadie" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Sadie. So "Cocaine Blues" is a murder ballad in the classic sense, as well as an example of centering the man as you say.

This is an interesting take.

Woman being brutally murdered by man/lover/.. is definitely the dominant theme.

You could compare it to the modern tv thriller, how many plots revolve around a woman killed by a man with the female character basically just playing the part of the symbolic victim?

I'm not sure the idea that the murderer's emotions are given so much more focus resonates with me though. Obviously hard to generalise as the world of folk music is vast, but my impression is that these kinds of songs usually skip over almost all nuance and detail, being made up of a few standard tropes/cliches, and the interest often comes from some twist/variation on the theme, or what the musician brings to it.

The world of folk music is filled with distasteful themes, and stuff that hasn't aged well. I'd say that sometimes performing a flawed song in a modern context can itself be subversive though. Not every performance of a song is a celebration of it. There's space for nuance.

> Strange anybody today would want to repeat these stories.

If this triggers you that much, then you are not going to like the iliad, bible or much of human literature/art/etc.