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.
Murder Ballads Old & New is a compelling delve into the perennial
American fascination with True Crime. Includes archival and historical
black & white images.
