Murder ballads are a little like the true-crime reports of
the folk music world, though the way their stories tend to transform and take
on new shades and shadows depending on the storyteller may place them closer to
campfire ghost tales. They are elastic, though they often begin with an actual
tragic incident. Paul Slade pulls murder ballads further from the campfire and
closer to the periodical rack with his new book Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime
Stories That Inspired Them. The author goes back to the original newspaper
stories and crime reports to detail the true stories behind such often-crooned
legends as “Pretty Polly”, “Tom Dooley”, “Frankie and Johnny”, “Stack-o-Lee”, and
“Poor Ellen Smith” as accurately as possible.
As each story becomes a musical source, Slade begins folding
the ballads into the tale, analyzing their faithfulness as journalism and what
they say about the culture of their times. This is particularly fascinating
when race is an issue, as it is in “Frankie and Johnny”, “Stack-o-Lee”, and
Dylan’s deeply chilling “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, which becomes
far more horrifying the more we learn about the loathsome “man-slaughterer”
William Zantzinger. Slade also tracks how the songs develop from rendition to
rendition, sometimes becoming completely distinct from the originals over time,
as when “Knoxville Girl” morphed into “Banks of the Ohio” or “Stack-o-Lee”
became the pop hit “Stagger Lee”. Sometimes these songs inspired answer or referential
songs, such as Billy Bragg’s “The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie” or Fred
Burns’s “Pretty Polly’s Revenge”.
Slade ends each chapter with his picks for the ten best
renditions/reinventions of its featured song, and seasons his narratives with
testimony’s and interpretations from artists such as Bragg, Mick Harvey of Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds, who recorded one of the more celebrated later-day
collections of murder ballads, and Kristin Hersh, whose Murder, Misery, and Then Goodnight is one of the finest and most
underappreciated ones. As for our author, he editorializes sparingly, mainly maintaining
a journalist’s critical distance in his telling, so his book rarely reads
luridly or morbidly. Nevertheless, the horrifying nature of these crimes—so
often perpetrated against women, and at the height of repugnance, an entire
family—and the beauty of the songs they inspired delivers an emotional wallop
that will only hit harder if you listen to some of these timeless, troubling
ballads as you read.
