Post by blue2blue on Nov 3, 2012 12:31:27 GMT -5
Some of you know that I'm a big consumer of traditional Anglo/Celtic music and its expression in the folk music of the English-speaking nations.
But one thing I've noticed since I first settled down with my mom's then-new-fangled FM radio (actually, it was only the use of the FM bands that was all that new) at the beginning of the 60s to listen to the legendary John Davis Folk Show (which appeared on a handful of stations over the decades), was the recurring theme of men murdering women, particularly lovers.
Over and over, in these songs, men murder women for a handful of reasons: unrequited love, unrequited lust, betrayal, inconvenient pregnancy, overwhelming psychotic love (the moment was so perfect, he wanted to make sure she would never leave him), social status problems (the chamber maid won't accept that the Duke doesn't actually love her and isn't going to leave the Duchess and so must be dealt with)... and on and on.
Sometimes, the men then kill themselves. But often they don't, feeling that they were somehow compelled to their crime. (Sometimes those men are dispatched at the end of the song.)
Now, there's often a thread of chilvalric attitude running through these songs. The girl is often a cypher -- often she appears to be a mystery to the men in the song -- but she is seldom seen as a villainess.
(Temptress songs are another sub-genre, but the anti-heroines of such songs don't seem to meet earthly violence nearly as often as the innocent victims of the love-murder ballads. Also, a totally separate genre: Medea-like songs, where a woman kills her children. Easier to figure that, since post-partum-depression child-killings have sadly been a fact of life through history.)
No, the victim is often pure (sometimes that's the problem, of course, as she rejects the physical advances of the protagonist), typically sympathetic, and there always seems to be an air of tragic crime to these songs, there's an implicit judgement against the men in most of these songs...
Now, there are certainly other murder ballads, songs of highwyamen and robbers and rebels. Let's face it, murder has often driven drama and literature from the earliest of human times.
But these love-murder ballads find overwhelmingly frequent expression in the folk music of the Appalachians and the American south.
I love bluegreass, but sometimes all the violence against women -- contextualized in assumed judgment or not -- gets to me and I find myself wondering just what in that historic social milieu bred this morbid fascination.
But one thing I've noticed since I first settled down with my mom's then-new-fangled FM radio (actually, it was only the use of the FM bands that was all that new) at the beginning of the 60s to listen to the legendary John Davis Folk Show (which appeared on a handful of stations over the decades), was the recurring theme of men murdering women, particularly lovers.
Over and over, in these songs, men murder women for a handful of reasons: unrequited love, unrequited lust, betrayal, inconvenient pregnancy, overwhelming psychotic love (the moment was so perfect, he wanted to make sure she would never leave him), social status problems (the chamber maid won't accept that the Duke doesn't actually love her and isn't going to leave the Duchess and so must be dealt with)... and on and on.
Sometimes, the men then kill themselves. But often they don't, feeling that they were somehow compelled to their crime. (Sometimes those men are dispatched at the end of the song.)
Now, there's often a thread of chilvalric attitude running through these songs. The girl is often a cypher -- often she appears to be a mystery to the men in the song -- but she is seldom seen as a villainess.
(Temptress songs are another sub-genre, but the anti-heroines of such songs don't seem to meet earthly violence nearly as often as the innocent victims of the love-murder ballads. Also, a totally separate genre: Medea-like songs, where a woman kills her children. Easier to figure that, since post-partum-depression child-killings have sadly been a fact of life through history.)
No, the victim is often pure (sometimes that's the problem, of course, as she rejects the physical advances of the protagonist), typically sympathetic, and there always seems to be an air of tragic crime to these songs, there's an implicit judgement against the men in most of these songs...
Now, there are certainly other murder ballads, songs of highwyamen and robbers and rebels. Let's face it, murder has often driven drama and literature from the earliest of human times.
But these love-murder ballads find overwhelmingly frequent expression in the folk music of the Appalachians and the American south.
I love bluegreass, but sometimes all the violence against women -- contextualized in assumed judgment or not -- gets to me and I find myself wondering just what in that historic social milieu bred this morbid fascination.