Wednesday, February 17: Tune It Or Die!
BOY KILLS GIRL
by Rob Lopresti
I haven’t written here about folk music in a while, so let’s talk a bit about that great American tradition, the murder ballad. Specifically the popular type that follows this pattern:
Boy invites girl to take a walk/ride
Boy kills girl
Boy is jailed/hung/threatened with damnation
Why done it
You may notice something missing from that formula: motive. And that’s my point. Most of these ballads don’t offer any explanation as towhy the guy killed a woman he obviously had some sort of friendly relationship with (or why did she go off with him?).
Some songs do offer a motive. She refused to marry him. (“I killed the only girl I love because she would not be my bride.” -The Banks of the Ohio”) Or she was unfaithful, whether or not the boy had any right/reason to assume fidelity. (“The answer that she gave him it sore did me oppress.” -The Lily of the West)
But there are an amazing number of songs with no apparent motive, as if killing your girlfriend is such a natural phenomenon that it doesn’t require an explanation. Little Sadie. Poor Ellen Smith. Rose Connoley. Knoxville Girl. And of course, the world-famous tune that helped to launch the Great Folk Scare:1
Pretty mysterious. Folklorists will tell you that when literature is silent on an important subject you can assume that that subject is understood by its audience, and possibly taboo. I’m not sure if anything still counts as taboo for discussion in our society (which may just show how acclimated I am), but some of you can remember female relatives going off to powder their noses when everyone understood that that wasn’t what they planned to do at all.
So what understood taboo is hiding under the silence within these songs? Pretty Polly offers at least a hint: “Polly, Pretty Polly come go along with me /Before we get married some pleasures to see.” Why would he kill a woman he was going to marry? Or: why would he marry a woman he wanted to kill?
The likely solution can be found in Omie Wise, which is a very old ballad called (Naomi Wise died in 1808): “Have mercy on my baby and spare me my life. I’ll go home as a beggar and never be your wife”
And there we have the motive: illegitimate pregnancy. Understood, but generally not sung about. That motive has been known to show up in a mystery or two, especially in historicals. Audrey Peterson practically built a career on it.
Whatever you want to say about teenage mothers and the like it looks like we don’t kill so many people about that issue today — at least not so many that it can be understood in silence.
A final thought
In preparing this piece I read an interesting article by a scholar named Teresa Goddi who would disagree with me, or at least feel I was making a distinction without a difference. She argues that whatever the alleged motive in the song: – infidelity, refusal to marry (i.e. to be monogamous), or unmarried pregnancy – the real sin that was being punished was women’s sexuality, end of story.
Something to think about next time you find yourself singing along with the Kingston Trio.
- The famous version of Tom Dooley by the Kingston Trio implies a motive by suggesting that the Grayson mentioned in the song might have been the victim’s lover. In reality, Colonel James Grayson helped capture Tom Dula, the murderer. [↩]
The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics defines murder by a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, or former spouse as “intimate homicide”. At present, women are much more likely than men to be the victims of intimate homicide—about one third of female victims of homicide are intimate homicides. This comprises almost 11% of all murders in the U.S.
You can view the stats here.
I thought the actual “happening” was a jealous 3-some…..Mr. Dooley had 2 ladies and was going to marry Laura. He stated until the end he didn’t hurt her but deserved to die which implicated he’d set free the other woman who’d gone on trial for the murder. Thus the ballad started back when(ever).
The only moral of this type story (to me) is: don’t mess with two wimmin’ at the same time professing love to both!!!
And thanks to you, I’m humming this tune in my “head” now!!!
Very interesting piece, Rob. I have always found these same ballads haunting and disturbing. There is something very unsettling about motiveless (apparent or just unknown) murder. Unpleasant things are always more digestible when we feel that we understand them. The kicker is that we seldom really do–usually, we just have the murderer’s ‘word’ to go on as to motive, though we are free to infer from the known circumstances as we will.
Good point, David. Whenever we hear of some horrible event – X kills 4 – I always start to ask “do they know why?” and then decide the question is pretty meaningless.
There’s a legend that Grayson saved Tom Dula (Dooley) from being lynched before he could be tried.
At the risk of offending Ms Goddi, I’ve concluded when it comes to a male’s motives in song, legend, literature, or the news… the public doesn’t care. However, when it comes to a female’s motive, the public dissects and analyzes and seeks justification. This not only applies to murder but even cheating: If a guy cheats, he’s a dog. If a woman cheats, she’s finding herself, or seeking her on space, or seeking consolation from a bad marriage.
I don’t know why this is, but society’s view doesn’t like likely to change any time soon.
I had heard tales that Tom Dula denied “harming a hair on that fair lady’s head” and vaguely thought someone else had been arrested and released, but the facts appear considerably more interesting.
According to witnesses, Anne Foster who was originally arrested for the murder of her cousin, Laura, was released after Tom was arrested. I recommend this account.