My paperback copy
of Burt’s book was printed in 1964, just a few years after I was born.
Basically, the book and I are both of the late-Boomer Generation: released into
a society on the verge of tremendous cultural upheaval.
Burt’s book, which
I have sitting before me as I write this, became important to me as the only
printed work I have come across that deals with a topic which has intrigued me
since early childhood. (Note: American
Murder Ballads is not the “only” book on the subject of Murder Ballads, but
it is so far the only physical copy that I own.)
You see, I was not
even 10 years old when I became aware that the pop music scene — normally the
territory of boundless cheerfulness — could also create somber and melancholic
songs about Death — and still get airplay and attention! That revelation came
to me through the radio and the turntable.
Interspersed with the majority of songs focused on romance — the endless variations of the eternal “I Love Her but She Doesn’t Love Me!” theme — the local New York City radio stations also gave us melodramatic songs about loved ones who have died. It’s very likely that anyone of my generation will automatically recall those tragic songs of lovers lost to motor vehicle crashes, with “Teen Angel,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” and of course “Leader of the Pack.”
But there were also more subtle
melancholic compositions about death brought about by illness, with titles like
“Honey” (Bobby Goldsboro), “Seasons in the Sun” (Terry Jacks), and “Memories of
Love” (Chicago) remaining most prominent in my memory alongside the more
lighthearted contemplation of the afterlife “And When I Die” as performed most
successfully by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears (written by Laura Nyro and
first recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary).
As an adult I would two contemporary folk songs that focus entirely on the end of life: “Long Ride Home” by Patty Griffin, and “Fancy Funeral” by Lucinda Williams. Both songs are worth checking out. I also highly recommend “My Death” from the classic Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.
Alongside these emotional
works were songs that addressed the violence of the times, from the American
war against Vietnam to the assassinations of Civil Rights leaders and the
deaths brought about by overall inequality.
American aggression
in Vietnam spawned songs on both side of the controversial war, with the
nationalistic “Ballad of the Green Berets” memorializing veterans who lost
their lives in war. But as hostilities intensified along with the number of
young American soldiers killed during the presidency of Richard Nixon, a much larger
body of works were recorded that referenced battlefield casualties in order to
create powerful anti-war songs. This category included the ironic songs “Sky
Pilot” (Eric Burdon and the Animals) and “Lucky Man” (Emerson, Lake &
Palmer). Other lyric works referred more directly to the death of American
soldiers but failed to gain much airplay, such as “The Unknown Soldier” (The
Doors), “The Grave” (Don McLean), and much later “Goodnight Saigon” (Billy
Joel).
There were also songs
that addressed the victims of social inequality and those who died in the Civil
Rights Movement, such as “Abraham, Martin, and John” (especially the
combination “sound montage” of “What the World Needs Now/Abraham, Martin, and
John” by radio host Tom Clay), “Ohio” (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young),
“Alabama” (Neil Young), and “In the Ghetto” (Elvis Presley).
And then there were
songs that continued the folk music tradition of songs about historical
accidents or incidents, such as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (Gordon
Lightfoot), “The Night Chicago Died” about a fictional gangland shooting that
was inspired by the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre (Paper Lace), “30,000
Pounds of Bananas” (Harry Chapin) about an actual trailer truck crash in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, and the obviously titled “Dance Band on the Titanic” (also by
Harry Chapin). It would be remiss not to include mention of songs about
apocalyptic crises: “Miami 2017” (Billy Joel), “It’s the End of the World as We
Know It” (R.E.M.), and the dueling versions of dystopia and utopia from The
Talking Heads in “Life During Wartime” and “Nothing but Flowers.”
As a child,
however, a handful of the most impressionable songs came to me via the turntable,
and it was these that first introduced me to the category of “the murder
ballad.” For this I can thank the folk music trio Peter, Paul, and Mary. They gave
me “accessible” versions of murder ballads such as “Pretty Polly,” “Polly
Vaughn,” and “Lily of the West.”
Hearing and being
drawn to these songs as an adolescent made me more aware of and open to the
appeal of musical works that highlighted the presence of death and frailty as
part of the human experience. But this fascination still flummoxes me because,
you see, I had no personal reason to be taken aback or surprised by the reality
of our mortality. Death was always part of my understanding of Life, the prize at the bottom of the
box. It still is.
Perhaps the big
shock and draw (pardon the pun) was the realization that music could be the
medium through which this message is told. The airwaves of my childhood were
dominated by cheerful songs, even when those same songs were moaning about a
broken heart and the impossibility of mending it. The pleasure must have been
in the contrast, the dark splotches on the otherwise brightly colored canvas.
Gimme Shelter?
As an adolescent I
had never been sheltered from the presence and possibility of death being
visited upon our loved ones or ourselves. You see, the grandparents who raised
me and my siblings never tried to shield us from the reality of death.
Their generation
had known the world differently. They knew Death as a cosmic force, a divinity
with its own presence and will. They respected it, even as they dreaded it.
They were Eastern
European immigrants in America who had been born in the late 1800s and
experienced firsthand the anguish of being a colonized people caught between
the martial ambitions of powerful nation states. They had survived wars.
They were also, as devout
Catholics, inheritors of a spiritual system still deeply infused with traditions
that were far older than the Roman Church. The Christian prayers they whispered
and the rites they performed were unconsciously palimpsestic and attended to more
than one metaphysical perspective.
It was their
“traditional” worldview that cradled my psyche’s development from infancy to
early adulthood. They had been my primary guardians, having taken my elder
siblings and me into their home after my parents divorced and my mother was
forced into a furious struggle of survival at a time when there were
practically no structures to support a single mother.
The reflection I am
engaging in here allows me to see that there was very little in my adolescent
experience that would encourage me to look through rose-tinted glasses and
pretend that death was not always a part of life. It was there in my family. It
was there in the society.
It was there.
We were what today would
be called the “working class poor.” This meant we were capable of getting
through each season thanks to the financial cleverness of my grandparents. (It
helped that we had a large vegetable garden, my grandmother knew how to budget,
and my grandfather was a carpenter capable of repairing anything — an innate
talent passed on to my older brother who could perform the miracle of
resurrection upon dead motor vehicles). My mother labored seven days a week at
her full-time and two part-time jobs, while we children hustled however we
could to bring in spare change until we turned 16 and were legally allowed part-time employment in retail and service jobs.
But I’m traversing
well-trodden territory, rehashing memories rich with the gripes and regrets
that I’ve so often sprinkled into my blog posts. Sorry about that. My thoughts
tended in this direction because I cannot separate the spiritual (and cultural)
experiences from the larger socioeconomic ones. You see, while my guardian
grandparents never tried to protect me from the awareness of death as an
ever-present potentiality, neither did the local community we grew up within.
Ours was a wonderfully
diverse neighborhood just a short bus ride from Manhattan. We were a
neighborhood in constant change and undergoing great economic and demographic turbulences
— even as the stormy Sixties reigned all around us at a national-cultural
level. The streets we roamed and roared through as children did nothing to
shelter us from the reality of death or the awareness that larger histories were
unfolding far above our lowly streets.
In my Roman
Catholic household (and this was probably true for all of those families headed
by European immigrants from other Catholic-majority states such as Italy,
Ireland, Hungary, and Poland) children were expected to accompany their elders to wakes
and funerals. We had to be there, and we had to “pay our respects” to whoever
was in the open casket, even when we had no idea who the “dearly departed”
were.
Sometimes in our
teenaged years we actually did know the departed. They were childhood friends who died of drug
overdoses or automobile accidents.
And then there were
the ones who went somewhere and never came back.
My earliest
recollection of someone disappearing
is the high school classmate of one of my much-older brothers, a young man who
went overseas to serve in Vietnam and never returned. I was constantly
fascinated by the chest of personal belongings he had stored in our garage, his
private cache of items that he didn’t even want his parents to have access to.
For as long as it remained in our garage that box would stay locked. I never
knew what had become of that secret trove of a disappeared man’s treasure.
Another box was
part of my childhood: the large cedar “hope chest” that belonged to my mother.
This coffin-shaped box
stays in my memory not because it held the naphthalene-scented blankets that
would keep us warm through cold winter months, but because beneath the quilts
and comforters was another kind of comfort, something my mother simply called
“the 22.”
To this day I have
no idea who was the actual owner of the .22-caliber hunting rifle, or how it
had come to be secreted beneath the linens. But I somehow always remember my
mother’s urgent mid-afternoon phone call from work when she asked me to tell my
grandmother to disinter the gun from beneath the blankets. That was the day the
frighteningly violent ’67 Newark riots turned once-quiet city streets into a
warzone, and it was all happening just a few blocks from our home. Slightly
more than a decade later I would pass those burnt-out buildings on my way to
college and shudder at the violence that unfurled wings of fire that day and
left behind crumbling, empty husks where once had been apartment homes filled
with life.
Not long after the
riots and their overflow of rage had burned out — leaving 26 dead and over 700
people injured — I remember accompanying my grandmother to the final mass held
in an old church building situated at the edge of this battleground between
despair and oppression. The once-impressive stained glass windows of the sacred
place had been shattered, and the walls outside were latticed with graffiti.
The church building was scheduled to be deconsecrated. That was another kind of
death.
My grandmother was
one of a handful of seniors from “the old country” who had come to join the
gray-haired priest in bidding farewell to the only place where these
transplanted souls had worshipped in the language of their motherland. She
would never attend a Sunday mass again.
My brothers and I,
the American born, would spend our Sunday mornings at prayer in a much newer
church building that served a different parish, one untouched by the furies of
impoverishment and inequality. We spoke to the angels, the saints, and the
tripartite deity in English.
We were just
children.
And though we were
unaware of it at this, the age of our ignorance, we were certainly not growing
up within an age of innocence. The world was shifting around us, and we were — all
of us — caught up in the turmoil. The instability had begun long before my
generation was born.
I was too young to
understand why the adults whispered about the Jewish mother in the corner apartment
whose husband paid me to walk their family dog when their only son went away to
college. I knew firsthand that the woman was “crazy.” She was barely able to
overcome her terror when she had to crack open the door to let her son’s large
dog slip free so I could catch and leash him. On occasions I heard her
screaming in terror though she was alone in her rooms.
And then I told my
friends. We’d chortle, too young to understand the meanness behind our
laughter. Our merriment was the manifestation of the barbarism all children
betray when burning ants with magnifying glasses or pouring salt on slugs. We
didn’t quite know why the adults scolded us for our private mockery and told us
that “the poor woman” still bore on her forearm the tattooed numbers of her
nightmare. But the adults never explained the meaning of those numbers. Perhaps
the memory of the Second World War was still too fresh and painful for them, with
the revelations that accompanied post-war “liberation” being too cold, too
personally terrifying, for them to speak of to their children.
Only decades later
would I remember this important detail, how the grownups spoke in hushed words
about the woman’s tattoos and the numbers that signified a history so unimaginably
horrible that even those who had actually come through the flames of war still
couldn’t speak forthrightly about it.
We were only children,
but ancient death was always among us. And despite our ignorance and
immaturity, surely our unconscious minds must have sensed upon our shoulders the
inherited burden of modern human history, a garland of skulls and warfare.
So, again, why was
it such a surprise to me as a child when death showed up in the music we
listened to?
The commercial
media that catered to the late-Boomer generation born in the late Fifties and
early Sixties fed us a steady diet of cultural sugar. Perhaps that is why the
infrequent dollops of bitterness within this recipe of sweet amusement seemed
all the more noticeable, their darkness more starkly visible against the
backdrop of bright candied treats that commercial radio and television upon our
plates for daily consumption.
