Those visitors who have been hanging out at 27th Street for a while know that from time to time the Daily Dose gets all thematic. I posted a long series of songs about drink and a longer series of songs about trains a while back. Now I have another little series up my sleeve. This is one is a little macabre though, so I’ve been reluctant to get it started. Murder ballads have been a significant part of the American songbook from early on. There exists every kind of murder ballad you want to think of, sung from every possible point of view. There are assassinations, crimes of passion, and there are passionate pleas that the listener not fall into the evil ways of the murderer. Macabre or not, I think it will be fun to listen to a bunch of these tunes.

Many of the murder ballads we know in North America can be traced back in some way or another to tunes from the “old country” somewhere in the UK or Europe. Sometimes the melody has stayed the same but the details of the crime have changed or the name of the victim. In some cases a particular tune has kept the same storyline more or less but the melody or treatment of the song changed from performer to performer. In other cases, as we’ll see today, the melody gets recycled along the way and becomes some other kind of song.

If you know some murder ballads you’d like me to post here, please leave a comment. I’ve started with a little list of them, just off the tip of my brain, and I’d appreciate the input. I think you might be surprised at how many well known murder ballads we can come up with together.

Let’s start things off with Pretty Polly. Here’s Mike Ginsberg

Pretty Polly has also been recorded as the Gosport Tragedy and the Cruel Ship’s Carpenter. Bob Dylan re-used the melody as Hollis Brown. Woody Guthrie, never one to waste a good melody either, adapted it for Pastures of Plenty. In the pop music world, people get all bent out of shape when a tune appears that has a melody strongly reminiscent of something recorded or performed by somebody else. But in folk music it’s no problem because we own those songs together and we give ourselves permission to borrow at will.  To digress for another moment, if Woody didn’t borrow the melody from Wabash Cannonball and turn it into Grand Coulee Dam, we never would have had one of my favourite verses in any genre of music – in the misty crystal glitter of the wide and windward spray, men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave….though she tore their boats to splinters, she gave men dreams to dream of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasted stream.

Let’s get to another tune. Here’s Nina Simone performing Hollis Brown

http://youtu.be/AsyQzLauhqI

Finally, let’s hear what happened once old Woody got hold of the tune. Here’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliott performing Pastures of Plenty.