Murder Ballads Old & New

 By Stephen L. Jones

Feral House     2023

224 pages     Music History

Here is the book’s description. “Murder Ballads Old & New: A Dark and Bloody Record is an exploration of an age-old topic— our human need to document the horrors of the world around us.  The murder ballad, here expanded to include songs about traumatic loss in modern variants and multiple styles, including punk, post-punk, alt-country, and folk. The book is a graveyard stroll past tombs both well-kept and half-hidden. Murder Ballads Old & New excavates facts about killers, victims, and the folkloric storytellers who disseminated their tales in song.

Author Steven L. Jones focuses the tragic ballad as “an act of remembering and a soul-reckoning with the ineffable.” Songs examined range from obscure tunes from the founding days of the United States to familiar canonical songs learned in schoolrooms and honkytonks. Jones tackles each song in a manner that’s equal parts musicological, psychosocial, and genealogical as he uncovers stories that reveal larger contexts and maps the lineages of songs and themes, forebears, and ancestors. Murder Ballads Old & New includes a wide range of songs and performers from the relatively unknown (Boiled in Lead, Freakons, Nelstone’s Hawaiians) to the ironically famous (Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth). Highlights include tales of Muddy Waters guitar sideman Pat Hare, whose incendiary blues boast “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” proved grimly prophetic. And honky-tonk pioneer Eddie Noack, whose morbid stab at late-career rebirth, “Psycho,” couldn’t match the bottomless tragedy of his own life.  As well as Depression-era holdup man Pretty Boy Floyd, Schubert’s mythical Erlkönig, and the Manson Family.”

Although I did not read the entire book, the introduction was very informative. And then, I read specifically about two songs: Lou Reed’s The Day John Kennedy Died and Desolation Row by Bob Dylan. I was particularly interested in Desolation Row because Dylan wrote it about a lynching in his father’s hometown, Duluth, which is my home town. Dylan grew up in Hibbing MN, but his father was a young boy in Duluth when three circus workers were lynched. I found it a fascinating example of history preserved in music.

Murder Ballads Old and New is a very dense, quite scholarly book, but music lovers will very much appreciate it. This copy is going to my musician brother. It came to me from the publisher, and it is on the market this week.

Here are YouTube versions about both songs: Lou Reed The Day John Kennedy Died and Bob Dylan  Desolation Row.