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PALMDALE NOIR An Evening of Music and Crime July 18, 2009
Robert Fisher, the front man of Americana noir collective The Willard Grant Conspiracy, will be hosting a salon-type discussion and performance of songs about crime, aided and abetted by Vince M. (a singer-songwriter stuck on the lost highway somewhere between Townes Van Zandt and Paul Westerberg), Mark Burgess (primo slide guitarist and ace performer of bloody, muddy blues) and Laura Browne-Sorenson (angel-voiced singer-songwriter and member of Celtic folk group The Browne Sisters and George Cavanaugh). They'll all be performing individually and in various combinations, talking and playing about robbery, assault, thievery, cheating, lying and other assorted crimes, including of course everybody's favourite: murder. Possible songs to be performed include "Folsom Prison Blues," one that deals with stealing beer from a convenience store, Springsteen's "Stolen Car" and an old (auld?) murder ballad sung in Gaelic. It's going to be some kinda night. If any SoCal-area crime fans and other Rare Birds (or even birds on vacation) have a hankering for caffeine and crime you can tap your foot to, Palmdale is about an hour north of LA, located in the High Desert. I'd love to see a few rare-birds representing. Hell, I think I'll even give out some crime books as door prizes... Music, Murder & Mayhem “… a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood “(Here are some) songs of robbers, liars and murderers. These songs are just for listening and singing. Don't go out and do it." “Go, Stagger Lee!” You think hip-hop is "bad"? Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet... Yeah, rap rubs a lot of people raw. It's been tagged as rude, crude, vulgar and offensive. And it “glorifies” crime. Guilty as charged. On all counts. And by all means don't forget to toss in “subversive.” But so what? Popular song (or “folk music,” if you will, since as Louis Armstrong - or possibly Sonny Boy Williamson or Big Bill Broonzy) once famously proclaimed, 'It's all folk music. Leastways, I never heard no horse play guitar.” Music has always been a reflection of what we really are, what we fear and what we aspire to. And where we really live. Warts and all. So should we blame music if it's an accurate reflection? Are we, as a people supposedly in favour of freedom, really ready to go down the slippery slope of censorship? After all, songs of bad people doing bad things for bad reasons are nothing new, and murder, of course, is everybody's favourite crime. Sometimes these songs sympathize with the victim; sometimes with the killer and sometimes they were simply a non-partisan (Hah!) retelling of events, but these “murder ballads” were pretty well established by the Middle Ages, and made up a fair chunk of the musical repertoire of the Old World. Needless to say, the tradition soon immigrated to the New World -- not that Native Americans didn't already have their own traditional songs and chants of murder and mayhem. Every culture, every nation, every people, has its own repertoire of secret -- or not so secret -- music, music that has survived through the years, beneath, beside or even as part of what is deemed “popular” music. And the U.S.A., a country born of violence and founded by criminals (at least according to British law) is certainly no exception. The earliest American crime songs were imported and adapted, murder ballads from the Scottish highlands became Appalachian breakdowns, Irish rebel songs like “The Bard of Armagh” became cowboy laments like “The Streets of Laredo,” and African tribal worksongs became the foundation of the blues. We beg, we borrow, we steal from other cultures, and gradually we become. Folklorist Alan Lomax, in the introduction to Bad Man Ballads, one of his countless collections of “field recordings” of assorted odes to outlaws, desperadoes and murderers, speaks of how “just below our civilized surface lies a wellspring of savagery always ready to emerge into the light of day.” Certainly that savagery was never more evident than 1992, when the Ice-T-penned “Cop Killer,” arguably the most controversial crime song of our time, as recorded by his group Body Count, was the favorite whipping boy of the powers that be and their followers, most of whom, rather predictably, had never actually heard it. That wide brush that has been used to tar rap ever since. Forget for a moment that it wasn't even a rap song, but thrash metal, and consider that it was clearly sung from the point of view not of the singer but of a fictitious character, as much as Randy Newman's “Short People” or even Johnny Cash's “Folsom Prison Blues” was. And forget that the song's intentionally offensive, sadly predictable concluding chant of “F*** the police! F*** the police!” verges on parody - and rather adolescent parody --at that. Instead, ask yourself what the circumstances were that led to its recording. And its subsequent notoriety -- and popularity. It was a protest song, every bit as as much as “Blowing in the Wind,” “We Shall Overcome” or “This Land is Your Land,” an angry song without doubt; born of anger and marketed to people who shared that anger. You can argue about the righteousness of that anger, or whether the song helped or hindered the cause -- or even to question how much of the ensuing anger -- both pro and con -- wasn't simply a ploy to sell records or score political points (a presidential election was in progress and LA was still recovering from the Rodney King riots). But to pretend the song was born in a vacuum, or to dismiss it as simply a cold, calculated piece of antagonism with no connection to real life is to bring disingenuousness to almost criminal levels. * * * * * It would be really cool to say my interest in songs about crime started in my youth, listening to my father and uncle, equipped with fiddles and banjos, sitting around the parlor, passing on old folk songs about murderous Newfoundland fishermen that were in turn passed down to them from their own fathers and uncles. But my Uncle Neil never played any instruments that I ever heard. And the only thing my dad played were records by assorted Hanks. No, I was a musical late bloomer. My passion for murderous melodies was probably ignited by some ubiquitous cheese ball ditty playing on the kitchen radio or perhaps tucked away on one of my sister's K-Tel compilations (22 Explosive Hits!!!), something totally uncool like Vicki Lawrence's “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” or Bobbie Gentry's “Ode to Billie Joe.” Some nice, easy listening warble so over-produced and slick that the import of its lyrics probably slid right off the brain of most of its listeners without ever sticking. But Lawrence's song (written by Bobby Russell) is actually about adultery, a double murder, a "make-believe" trial and the wrong man found guilty. Meanwhile, Gentry's song is a slice of pure mystery - an ambiguous Southern Gothic-fried slab of suicide and dark secrets, playing out as dinner table speculation. What was it that caused Billy Joe McAllister to jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge? An interracial love affair? An abortion? A stillborn child? A clandestine homosexual relationship? Pass the biscuits, please… * * * * * The airwaves, it turned out, were full of this stuff, a heady discovery for a kid who usually had his nose buried in the latest Hardy Boys adventure or was anxiously awaiting that Saturday night's episode of Mannix, when I would be allowed to stay up late. I started listening more closely. And my efforts were soon rewarded. Jim Croce was on the kitchen radio too, cheerfully singing about “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” and warning that that “You Don't Mess Around with Jim.” But both songs were thinly veiled musical and spiritual descendants of “Stagger Lee,” the anti-hero of a popular blues/folk song that had already been recorded in hundreds of different versions, most famously by Lloyd Price, whose piano-driven version rocked the 1958 pop charts. The protagonist of the song has become the archetype, the very embodiment of the freewheeling, defiant badass black man who just doesn't give a damn. Stagger Lee (also known as Stagolee, Stackerlee, Stack-a-Lee, etc., etc.) is openly contemptuous of all -- but especially white-authority (it's tempting to think of the narrator in Body Count's “Cop Killer” and even Shaft as just another incarnation). The original song was based (maybe) on the case of a black street hustler convicted of stabbing (or maybe shooting) Billy Lyons to death, possibly over accusations of cheating at dice (or maybe cards), in St. Louis, Missouri sometime back around the turn of the last century. The song has since been recorded - and rewritten - by everyone from Price to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who did a blood-drenched, obscenity-laden take on their appropriately titled Murder Ballads album. Others who have tackled it include Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, Beck, Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Doc Watson, Professor Longhair and The Isley Brothers, and the character himself has re-emerged in songs by artists as disparate as the previously mentioned Croce (“Bad Bad Leroy Brown" even uses the same piano vamp as its driving force, and "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" ends with the pool shark hero of its title getting his bloody comeuppance at the end of a blade, one of Staggerlee's preferred weapons) and The Clash, whose ska re-imagining (via the Jamaican group The Rulers) entitled "Wrong 'em, Boyo" appeared on their 1980 album London Calling. “Mack the Knife”? It's about another stone-cold killer, MacHeath, a gangster with a penchant for knives. In the original version (written in German by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their 1928 play, The Three-Penny Opera, itself based on John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera), Mack's crimes include the killing of seven children in a fire and the rape of an underage widow. The most famous version, of course, is Bobby Darin's finger-snapping showstopper, but even that one, sanitized as it is, boasts of “scarlet billows” starting to spread. “Folsom Prison Blues”? Johnny Cash, no stranger to crime and punishment (or the gray bar hotel), made his mark with this one way back in 1955. And it still contains possibly the most disturbing and chilling lyric in American music. As angry as the narrator in "Cop Killer" is, at least he's angry ABOUT something. The self-pitying but barely repentant convict of Folsom Prision sits in a cell because he shot a man in Reno, as he dispassionately admits, “just to watch him die.” No wonder that Quentin Tarrantino, in the liner notes to Cash's 2000 compilation of crime songs (appropriately titled Murder) referred to the man in black as the “original hillbilly gangsta.” Even the beloved Beatles tried to sneak one in under the wire. “You Better Run,” the decidedly weak sister finale to 1965's Rubber Soul, one of the all-time great rock'n'roll albums, reveals a much darker heart than fans of the Fab Four give them credit for. Amid such stone-cold classics as “In My Life” and “Nowhere Man,” “Run” always seemed like little more than mop top filler -- just an oddly cheerful warning to an unfaithful girlfriend. But check out the lyrics more closely. Toronto's Cowboy Junkies -- no strangers to darkness themselves -- did, and brought it all home a few years ago, turning the menace up to eleven, transforming the by-the-numbers Merseybeat bounce into a lethargic grungy dirge full of dissonant guitar noises and chain-gang bellows, unearthing the twisted murder blues at its dark heart, forcing listeners to -- for once -- really notice the words. When lead vocalist Margo Timmins, sings in her come-hither deadpan that "I'd rather see you dead, little boy, than to see you with another woman." She means it, man. Not that the songs always focused on the bad guys - sometimes the songs were more about the victims, be it “The Peddler and His Wife,” an old Appalachian song at least a hundred years old about a couple who drove their wagon down the wrong road one night, or “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” a decidedly modern spin by The Ramones (“She went away for a holiday/Said she was going to LA/But she never got there/She never got there, I swear”). The truth is, we love in a violent society, and it's shaped and formed our culture, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. Even something as seemingly innocuous (and dumb) as Ram Jam's 1977 hit cover of folksinger Leadbelly's “Black Betty” reveals a secret heart of darkness upon closer inspection. “Black Betty was the nickname given to the whip used in some southern prisons. I could go on (and on). Our musical history is chockfull of examples. Outlaw songs. Gunslinger songs. Bank robber songs. Murder songs. Sometimes the good guys win; mostly they don't. Dusty, musty oldies marking the lives of Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin and Pretty Boy Floyd are replaced by odes to Charlie Starkweather (Springsteen's “Nebraska") and Mafiosi (Dylan's “Joey”). Traditional airs celebrating the battles of moonshiners versus the “revenooers” are replaced by ditties about drug dealers and smugglers by artists as diverse as Arlo Guthrie, Steve Earle, 50 Cent and Jay-Z. And the beat goes on…
A slightly different version of this article appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Mystery SceneBy Kevin Burton Smith, the Edgar Award-winning magazine which covers the crime fiction beat in all its guises. Any questions or comments? Feel free to contactthe author via e-mail. Despite rumours to the contrary, he doesn't bite. |
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