Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads 9781501355141, 9781501355172, 9781501355165

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MURDER BALLADS Praise for the series It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rockgeek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound​.c​om and our website at http:​/​/www​​.bloo​​msbur​​y​.com​​/musi​​cands​​ound​s​​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/33​.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Timeless by Martyn Deykers Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more…

Murder Ballads

Santi Elijah Holley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Santi Elijah Holley, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 117 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5514-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5516-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-5515-8 1

Series: 333

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Contents

Introduction 1   1 Song of Joy 11   2 Stagger Lee 25   3 Henry Lee 37   4 Lovely Creature 47   5 Where the Wild Roses Grow 57   6 The Curse of Millhaven 69   7 The Kindness of Strangers 77   8 Crow Jane 87   9 O’Malley’s Bar 97 10 Death Is Not the End 107 Acknowledgments  Notes

117 119

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Introduction

I have to think of all this as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There’s nobody that’s going to kill traditional music. All those songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come and take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die. —Bob Dylan, 1966 Murder Ballads, the ninth studio album by rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, was released almost twentyfive years ago, in February 1996. It was the band’s biggest commercial success to date, selling over a million copies worldwide, and it remains one of their most popular albums, despite (or because of) its shocking and appalling subject matter. Themes of violence, carnage, and bloodshed were not unfamiliar to the band. Each of the Bad Seeds’ eight previous albums, from their 1984 debut From Her to Eternity to 1994’s Let Love In, included at least one song with somebody

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meeting an unnatural end. Beginning with the Birthday Party, the band which preceded and metamorphosed into the Bad Seeds, murder and misfortune has always found a way into Cave’s lyrics. “I’ve always enjoyed writing narrative songs and I’ve always especially enjoyed writing about murder and violence,” Cave explained.1 But dedicating an album to murder hadn’t occurred to the band until this moment. It was such a ridiculous, preposterous conceit—it was almost too easy. “It actually started as a joke, in a way,” Cave said, “because the idea of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds dedicating an entire album to murder titillated us in some way, because it was so obvious.”2 Regardless of how obvious or humorous it might’ve seemed to them at the time, when the Bad Seeds made this decision, they were joining a long tradition of songwriting and song interpretation, a tradition spanning thousands of years, several continents, and many piles of bodies. This book is over twenty years in the making. In 1999, not long before my nineteenth birthday, I’d found a used copy of Murder Ballads at my local record store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Though I’d been vaguely familiar with Nick Cave, I’d never taken the time to listen to his music. At that time in my life, I was seriously committed to punk rock—playing in bands, going to shows, reeling off anti-capitalist jargon—and Cave, with his perplexing narratives, his preoccupations with the Bible, and what I took to be his spurious romanticism didn’t resonate with me. And the band’s music—at times discordant and cacophonous; other times slow and 2

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sentimental—couldn’t be further from the two-minute, three-chord songs I favored. But during this same time I’d also been developing a nascent interest in traditional American folk and blues music, after discovering Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Son House, Elizabeth Cotten, and Woody Guthrie. These musicians seemed to come from a different world, far from the relatively quiet Midwestern town where I lived. In their world, guitar players made deals with the devil, boll weevils decimated cotton fields, the blues walked around like a man. I listened to these strange songs in private, worried my friends wouldn’t understand this music or, worse, my punk credentials would be revoked. So when I chanced upon Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads at Encore Records, I was intrigued. I was already familiar with the murder ballad tradition—the great Mississippi John Hurt had introduced me to “Frankie and Johnny,” “Louis Collins,” and the bad man “Stagolee,” while Blind Willie McTell’s “Delia” haunted many late nights— but until that moment, I hadn’t considered that other contemporary punk or post-punk artists might also be familiar with and fascinated by this bygone and rather esoteric genre. I purchased the CD, brought it home, and immediately gave it a spin—and thus began a twenty-year obsession with Nick Cave, with ballads, and with the confluence of folk music, literature, and early American history. Before we go any further, let’s get one thing out of the way: this is not a biography of Nick Cave. You won’t learn about Cave’s childhood in these pages, nor will we be discussing 3

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the formation and development of his bands, from Boys Next Door to the Birthday Party to the Bad Seeds. Unfortunately, the only comprehensive biography to date is Ian Johnston’s Bad Seed, which, while an enjoyable read and highly recommended, was published in 1995, soon after the release of Let Love In and before Murder Ballads. Stranger than Kindness, Cave’s collection of ephemera and personal commentary, published in March 2020, is the closest we’ve yet had to an autobiography. A new, updated, and complete biography is long overdue, but this is not that book. While this book assumes a basic knowledge of Cave’s life and work, it is by no means a prerequisite. I trust that the reader will already have, if not an appreciation, at least a familiarity with the Bad Seeds. But, again, it is not required. Unlike some other excellent volumes in the 33 1/3 series, this book is not a fly-on-the-wall story of the recording of the album, nor is it a personal and impassioned tribute to its genius (though I hope that will be made manifest by the end of the book). This book is instead an examination of the themes and background of each of the ten songs on Murder Ballads, drawing on critical analysis, history, interviews, and research. The ballad tradition that inspired and informed Murder Ballads has a long, tangled, and extremely rich history, going back many centuries and spanning continents. When we refer to ballads in these pages, of course, it’s important to distinguish them from the modern usage (think power ballads or pop ballads). In The Penguin Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World, Albert B. Friedman describes a ballad as “a short, traditional, impersonal narrative told 4

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in song, transmitted orally from generation to generation, marked by its own peculiar structure and rhetoric, and uninfluenced by literary conventions.”3 A ballad is a “short narrative poem,” write Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge in their introduction to English and Scottish Popular Ballads, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical structure, divided into stanzas, and characterized by complete impersonality so far as the author or singer is concerned. This last trait is of the very first consequence in determining the quality or qualities which give the ballad its peculiar place in literature. A ballad has no author.4 Though a ballad may be inspired by true events—a lovers’ quarrel, a murder, the sinking of a ship—its fidelity to historical facts is not to be expected and is overall unnecessary. To ascribe a particular ballad to an individual author or composer, too, is out of the question: “If a wouldbe creative literary artist has no individuality that we can detect, we set him down as conventional, and that is an end of him and his works,” write Sargent and Kittredge. “In the ballad it is not so. There the author is of no account. He is not even present. We do not feel sure that he ever existed.”5 The singer of a ballad is “merely the narrator of events with which he personally has no connection and for which he has no responsibility,” writes folklorist and song collector Cecil James Sharp in English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.6 Ballads have existed since at least the medieval age and were popular throughout Britain and Ireland until the 5

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nineteenth century. Many English ballads were recorded as broadsides, an inexpensive form of mass media, printed on a single sheet of paper and used to disseminate the news and events of the day. When immigrants from Europe brought their native ballads with them to North America, these ballads adapted to their new surroundings, often celebrating American rogues and outlaws, developing into what folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax termed “bad man ballads.”7 In ballads, accuracy and veracity are usually secondary to sensationalism. In this respect, they were the precursor to social media. Tom Waits describes ballads as “just a cut above graffiti . . . the oral tabloids of the day.”8 Murder ballads, of which there are dozens of recorded examples, typically recount a true event, using real names and places. Because they are composed by and meant to be performed for the “common folk,” these ballads are simple and easy to understand and remember. They are also, as a rule, not intended to be humorous, or to make light of the murder in question. Olive Woolley Burt, in her 1958 book, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories, makes this point abundantly clear: “Very few authentic folk songs find any comedy in murder of any sort,” she writes, with a certain prim and proper gentility. “If the verses consciously attempt to poke fun, they are generally a spurious composition and not a genuine product of the folk.”9 Notwithstanding its title, not every song on Murder Ballads qualifies as a ballad, if taking the above conditions into account. Comparing the album to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s seminal 1798 poetry collection 6

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Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, Nick Groom, professor of literature in English at the University of Macau, suggests the Bad Seeds record would be more accurately titled Murder Ballads, with a Few Other Songs.10 In this book, I examine each song on its own merits, connecting it to the historical ballad which inspired it, either directly or indirectly, or to the ballad it most closely resembles. In some cases, a song isn’t informed by a documented ballad and is instead influenced by a work of literature or film. Some songs rely on a variety of sources, and I’ve tried to show how Cave connects these disparate threads. Within these pages, I offer a primer to the ballad tradition, a close and critical reading of the lyrics, and a tribute to the creative process. Though it could go without saying, the language in these pages can at times be graphic and offensive, detailing acts of extreme violence, particularly against women. I do not endorse the behavior of the characters of these songs, nor do I necessarily agree with the sentiment that art is somehow exempt from accountability. A work of art can itself be harmful, and there’s no denying that murder ballads (and, for that matter, the entire music industry) are by and large maledominated, predisposed to misogyny and the objectification of women. Those readers interested in a deeper insight into this subject are encouraged to read Christina Ruth Hastie’s 2011 essay, “‘This Murder Done’: Misogyny, Femicide, and Modernity in 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads,” which I reference in Chapter 5, “Where the Wild Roses Grow.” The violence found in murder ballads, while shocking, is not unique to the genre. As G. Malcolm Laws writes in 7

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Native American Balladry: “Those who feel that ballads are unusually morbid or gruesome may compare them not only with the stories that make the headlines but with many of the classics of written literature from pre-Christian times to the present. Since most ballads owe their very existence to sensational events, it is inevitable that murder should have a prominent place in balladry.”11 There is a certain abiding curiosity in violent works of art. Many of us today, if we are lucky, are disconnected from the reality of violence and death, writes Dr. Daniel Newman of Cardiff University, and as a result we seek art through which we can enjoy some macabre pleasure in viewing death from our safe distances: Music that deals in death can be understood in such a way, with Murder Ballads a prime example, providing an experience through which listeners are able to visit dark themes of murder and death and, in doing so, have a variety of types that they can choose from, such as gallows humour or tragedy depending on their mood, and what they want from the experience.12 *** The chapters in this book are arranged consecutively, corresponding to the 1996 sequence. Other versions of Murder Ballads have since been released, with a different running order, but I’ve chosen to stick to the 1996 release, as I believe it remains the most recognizable. The Bad Seeds

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recorded three additional cover songs during the Murder Ballads recording sessions—“Knoxville Girl,” “The Willow Garden,” and “King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki-Mi-O”—but, since they were ultimately left off the final album, I chose not to include chapters on these songs.* While working on this book, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with Mick Harvey, who had been Cave’s longest collaborator and bandmate until his departure from the Bad Seeds in 2009, and Jim Sclavunos, who joined the Bad Seeds in 1995 and contributed percussion and drums to Murder Ballads. I am also grateful to have spoken with Rocky Schenck, who directed the music videos for “Henry Lee” and “Where the Wild Roses Grow.” Though I was not able to interview Cave, I managed to dig up dozens of earlier interviews, from just before the album’s release, to retrospective interviews given years later. These sources are credited at the end of the book. Murder Ballads is, of course, an exceptionally dark and macabre record, yet it offers a sort of perverse joy. Bad Seeds bass player Martyn P. Casey calls it a “party record,” while Conway Savage, the late keyboard player, said Murder Ballads had “always been loosely referred to in the band as a ‘comedy’ record.” Late coproducer Tony Cohen remembered seeing “probably more than twenty people all sitting around the floor [of the studio], shaking things and banging things and basically having a huge laugh.”13

These three songs can be found on the 2005 compilation B-Sides & Rarities.

*

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“What always happens with [The Bad Seeds], once we get hold of an idea we really run with it,” Cave said in 1995, before the record’s release. “We kind of ran with this beyond reason, in a way. It’s a monstrous thing in the end, and in my view quite unlistenable, but at the same time I guess it’s kind of a nice record to have.”14

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1 Song of Joy

It begins with an invocation, an appeal to the listener, a petition for a sympathetic ear. It is a supplication, a prayer for compassion. It is the sound of a man with nothing left but his suffering and nothing to offer but his story. But to whom is this appeal addressed? Who is the listener on the receiving end of this petition? Is it some ordinary husband and father, standing in the doorway of his home, momentarily detained by this surprise visitor? The narrator has traveled a great distance to arrive here, and he has no time to waste with formalities or unnecessary preamble. Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s anonymous bard of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the unnamed narrator of “Song of Joy” does not wait for an invitation from the listener whose door he has darkened, because he is not asking permission. He is demanding attention. With its dirge-like drums, its ghostly organ, its mysterious single-note tone, pulsing like a heart monitor, and Nick Cave’s low and resonant vocals, “Song of Joy,” belying its title, is a bleak and desolate story. Cave’s voice reaches the lowest

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depths, rattling the silverware, settling deep within your bones. He is not so much singing as intoning the words. The opening verse uses the “come all ye” formula of popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English and Scottish folk ballads, as compiled and published by folklorist Francis James Child, particularly the seventeenth-century English ballad, “Robin Hood and the Beggar”: Come light and listen, you gentlemen all Hey down, down, and a down That mirth do love for to hear And a story true I’le tell unto you If that you will but draw near. As the album opener, “Song of Joy” sets the stage for all the mirth and madness to follow. The unnamed narrator invites you, the listener, into his world, while also asking if you would beckon him into yours. But while “Song of Joy” serves as an overture or prelude to Murder Ballads, it was recorded before there was any consideration of dedicating an entire album to songs about murder. After wrapping basic recording sessions in London at the close of 1993, for what would be the Bad Seeds’ eighth studio album, Let Love In, members of the band returned to Melbourne, Australia, for overdubs and mixing. On December 14, at the Metropolis Audio recording studio, Cave and longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey began to improvise a new song. “I was playing drums and Nick was playing the piano, and we just recorded the basic track,” Harvey says. “I think

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he felt immediately that that didn’t belong on Let Love In. It inhabited its own space, its own kind of world.” This new song was too dark, too macabre, even by Bad Seeds standards. It was, Harvey admits, “a pretty spooky song.” It did, however, share similarities with another song the band had recorded months earlier, around the time of the Let Love In sessions. “O’Malley’s Bar” (which we will return to later) was told from the point of view of another unreliable narrator, who also happens to be a sociopathic killer on a murderous rampage. With these two new compositions, the band found itself with two thematically similar songs, neither of which had a home. That’s when the new project began to come into shape. “Really what we did was to make a record on which these two songs would sit comfortably,” Cave said. “So we made it around the rather spurious subject of murder.”1 Though an album of murder-themed songs seemed at the time like an obvious choice for the Bad Seeds—who, since forming in 1983, had customarily fit at least a couple of murder songs on each of their eight previous albums—an entire record solely dedicated to the subject hadn’t occurred to the band until that moment. There would be none of Cave’s personal or confessional songs. The record would inhabit its own domain, not so much signaling a new direction for the band, but serving instead as an interlude and, above all, a catharsis. “This was a multifunctional record, in that it was necessary for a lot of reasons,” Cave said. “We wanted to make a record that was literally impossible to tour with, no matter what.”2

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The band’s aversion to touring owed in large part to an unpleasant experience. Immediately after a two-month tour of Europe, the Bad Seeds had flown to the US to join the two-and-a-half-month-long 1994 Lollapalooza tour, which was then an annual, traveling festival of mostly American alternative rock and grunge acts. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds weren’t yet a big name in America, and they soon found themselves overworked and largely misunderstood by festival goers. “First of all, there was fatigue and exhaustion,” Bad Seeds percussionist Jim Sclavunos says. “Second, there was a certain level of exasperation. We had just come from a headlining tour of Europe, but with the Lollapalooza tour we were on at something like two o’clock in the afternoon, wedged between, I think, L7 and the Breeders. Playing in the afternoon, fully decked out in our suits. Blazing hot sun, already a bit burned out from the previous tour.” An American-born multi-instrumentalist and former drummer for seminal 1970s no-wave bands Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and 8 Eyed Spy, Sclavunos was invited by Cave to contribute percussion and organ on Let Love In. He then joined the band for the Let Love In tour and the following Lollapalooza tour, and he has been a member of the Bad Seeds ever since. But his first experience as a touring member of the band wasn’t a particularly auspicious one. “Our profile in the States at that point was pretty low,” Sclavunos says. “We weren’t MTV darlings and we definitely weren’t considered a major attraction of the Lollapalooza tour. . . . I think everybody in the band had pretty much lost the plot by the end of the tour and were fed up with the 14

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tour itself, with the relentless grind of it and the lackluster response we were getting.” An example of this frustration can be seen in a video clip from that tour, in which Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins attempts to interview a visibly exasperated (and likely hungover) Cave for MTV’s “120 Minutes” program. As Corgan stumbles his way through pre-prepared interview questions, Cave grows increasingly exasperated, at one point having to remind Corgan that the Bad Seeds weren’t “English.” It gets worse from there, with Cave conceding that 27-year-old Corgan has “the mentality of a teenager,” until the video stops and cuts to live footage. Sclavunos believes this tour may have had an influence on the band’s next album. Recording a record where everyone is murdered in myriad, violent ways seemed like a perfectly reasonable catharsis after Lollapalooza. “I think it was a little bit of a reaction to the American tour,” Sclavunos says. “And being so deeply embedded in America during Lollapalooza, and the fallout from that and the impressions of that. Before I joined the band, they had done tours of America, but never quite so long and never quite on that scale. . . . I think that fed into Murder Ballads a little bit.” Though “Song of Joy” was recorded during the Let Love In sessions, before the theme of the next record had yet been conceived, its placement at the start of Murder Ballads serves not only as a prologue to the album, but also as a bridge between the two records. As Ian Johnston writes in his 1995 biography of Nick Cave, Bad Seed, “Song of Joy” was 15

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originally titled “Red Right Hand II,” and was to be a sort of follow-up to “Red Right Hand,” from Let Love In. But aside from those three words, the two songs share few similarities. “Red Right Hand” is a sort of noir-blues, narrated in the third person about a mysterious, Faustian figure. It’s catchy. You can snap your fingers and sing along to it. “Song of Joy,” on the other hand, includes no choruses, refrains, or hooks. Narrated in the first person, by an anonymous speaker to an unnamed listener, it is claustrophobic and discomfiting. It is a private song. It is meant to be listened to alone, at night, with the lights off and a bitter wind rattling the windows. As Cave explained, his motivation for “Song of Joy” had been “to write a throughout evil song.”3 “Song of Joy” tells the story of a nameless drifter who has landed at a stranger’s door one night. After asking forgiveness for his imposition, the narrator goes on to relate the story of how he came to this misfortune. He’d fallen in love ten years ago with a young woman named Joy, “a sweet and happy thing,” with eyes like “bright blue jewels.” They’d married and enjoyed peace and happiness early on. But Joy is soon stricken with a severe melancholy which never leaves her. We aren’t told the cause of Joy’s sorrow, but the narrator suggests she may have had some intuition or foreboding sense of her ultimate fate, which she’d carried like a curse with her the rest of her days. The couple give birth to three children: Hilda, Hattie, and Holly. But rather than providing a salve to the unhappy couple, the three daughters inherit not only their mother’s bright, blue eyes but also her deep and unwavering melancholy, which causes even the neighbors to comment and gossip. 16

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By this point in his story, the narrator has already dropped the first clue as to his potential unreliability. While lamenting Joy’s descent into melancholy, he cries, “Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells, hail, horrors, hail!” Lifted from Book I of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, these are the words spoken by Satan following his expulsion from heaven and banishment to the underworld. Milton’s unbroken quote reads: Farewell, happy fields Where joy for ever dwells; hail, horrors, hail Infernal world; and thou profoundest hell Receive thy new possessor By leaving this quote incomplete, the drifter draws attention to the alliterative parallel to his daughters’ names, which may or may not be coincidental. This reference to Milton, as we will soon see, is also no accident. One night, the story continues, the narrator was away from home, attending to a sick friend, when somebody entered his home, bound his wife and daughters with electrical tape, stabbed them to death, and stuffed their bodies into sleeping bags. He returns home at midnight to find his family murdered. The police are unable to find a suspect, while the killer has meanwhile gone on to murder many more. The killer uses his victims’ blood to quote lines from Milton’s poetry on the walls, while the narrator informs us that in his own home, inked with his family’s blood, the killer had written the words, “his red right hand,” a phrase from Paradise Lost. The use of “calling cards” by serial killers is a familiar trope in film and fiction, as well as a few well-known historical 17

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cases, most famously the Zodiac Killer’s cryptograms, Richard “the Night Stalker” Ramirez’s pentagrams, and Keith Hunter Jesperson’s smiley faces. In fiction, particularly in crime stories, the use of calling cards is more ubiquitous, for example, Buffalo Bill’s Death’s-Head hawkmoth from The Silence of the Lambs, or in Peter Straub’s “Blue Rose” trilogy, where the killer (or killers) write “Blue Rose” on the wall near the victims’ bodies (we will return to Straub in a later chapter). In Let Love In’s “Red Right Hand,” the mysterious protagonist is understood to possess a literal red-stained hand, with which he grants wishes for a terrible price. In “Song of Joy,” however, the red right hand is mentioned only once, when it appears on the narrator’s wall, written in his family’s blood. The red right hand also appears just once in Paradise Lost, in Book II. One of many rebel angels banished with Satan to the underworld, Belial attempts to persuade Satan and the other devils not to continue to provoke God. They’d already lost heaven, but Belial cautions that God could be capable of even further retaliation. What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, Awak’d, should blow them into sevenfold rage, And plunge us in the flames? Or, from above, Should intermitted vengeance arm again His red right hand to plague us? In Milton’s telling, the red right hand belongs to God, an instrument of divine judgment. In the New Testament, Jesus is said to sit at the right hand of God’s throne, while in Psalm 110, King David is the one who sits at God’s right hand, and together they will “crush kings on the day of his 18

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wrath.” Milton appears to take a similar approach, suggesting God acts as a type of war general, dispatching his Son to crush insurrections. As with many Judeo-Christian myths and poems, this image was borrowed from pre-Christian sources. In his “Ode to Augustus Caesar,” published in 23 BCE, the Roman poet Horace writes that the troubles plaguing the empire had been directed by the god Jupiter, who’d sent hailstorms and thunderbolts to Rome with his “rubente dextera,” commonly translated as “red right hand.” Nearly 150 years after Milton, Lord Byron would appropriate “red right hand” in praise of American colonists following the Revolutionary War, in his 1819 poem, “Ode on Venice”: She has taught Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag, The floating fence of Albion’s feebler crag, May strike to those whose red right hands have bought Rights cheaply earn’d with blood. But an even closer parallel to Cave’s red right hand can be found in the 1898 poem by Scottish poet Robert Buchanan, “Man of the Red Right Hand.” Buchanan’s central figure is not an avenging god, ghost, or guru, but a mortal man who, in a vain attempt to win God’s favor, brandishes a “crimson knife” and ritualistically slaughters all the birds of the sky and beasts of the Earth: And the birds fell down and bled with pitiful human cries, And the butcher’d Lambs of the Sea lookt up with pleading eyes, 19

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And the blood of bird and beast was red on sea and land, And drunk with the joy of Death was Man with the Red Right Hand After discovering the words “his red right hand” written in blood on his wall, the narrator of “Song of Joy” has to be told, presumably by the police, that this is a quote from Paradise Lost, leading us to believe he is unfamiliar with Milton’s poem. While the killer continues his murderous spree, leaving behind his calling card of Milton’s words, our narrator would then have us believe he has abandoned his home and become a drifter, dependent on the mercy and kindness of strangers. In the final verse, the drifter asks to be given shelter for the night, stating that it “would be the sum of earthly bliss.” In Book VIII of Paradise Lost, Adam, not yet expelled from the Garden, rejoices with Eve over the beauty Creation: “Thus have I told thee all my state, and brought / My story to the sum of earthly bliss.” Published four years after Paradise Lost, Milton’s 1671 tragic drama “Samson Agonistes” opens with the famed military hero Samson who, having been defeated, blinded, and jailed in a labor prison in Gaza, is permitted to sit and rest in the open air for “Festival Day.” During a visit from friends and tribesmen, Samson laments his fate, echoing the narrator’s final words in “Song of Joy”: The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave 20

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These subtle references to Milton are not merely appropriative. The narrator is taunting his listener, daring us to catch him in his charade. He’s baiting us, like a cat playing with his catch before devouring it. Or is he? Could the narrator be unaware of, or at least unable to control, his brutality? When he mentions early in his monologue that he had once been a doctor, a connection could be drawn to another infamous doctor: Dr. Henry Jekyll, from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, the struggle between man’s good and evil natures is waged in the unconscious mind. Man, possessing free will, is in an eternal battle between these two natures. Only when Dr. Jekyll ingests a specially concocted serum could the respected doctor act upon his long-repressed wickedness, by becoming his alter ego, Mr. Hyde. The doctor had at first believed that by isolating his inner, malevolent self, he could then be cured of it. But he realizes too late that he was mistaken. In a written confession before taking his own life, the doctor admits his evil nature was too great, the appetite for murder too satisfying: Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror.4 Some notorious serial killers are said to have acted mechanically, as though they are unable to control their 21

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actions, governed by their unconscious, evil nature. Before his capture in 2005, Dennis Rader, the “BTK (Bind Torture Kill) Killer,” wrote in a letter to the Wichita Sun newspaper, “I can’t stop it so the monster goes on and hurts me as well as society.”5 In 1945, William Heirens, the “Lipstick Killer,” used his victim’s lipstick to scrawl on the wall near her body, “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself.”6 This same plea might be made by the anonymous narrator of “Song of Joy.” Does he want to be caught, to be stopped before he takes more innocent lives? Or does he literally transform, from a doctor and family man into a homicidal vagrant, waking in the morning without any knowledge of what had transpired in the night? This would explain his apparent ignorance of Milton, despite echoing his words, and the candor with which he shares his story. Or perhaps he, like many of the characters in Murder Ballads, is simply a bad seed. While he shares similarities to killers both fictitious and factual, the narrator of “Song of Joy” differs from killers in other historical murder ballads in one significant way: he claims more than one victim. But though most murder ballads, from Britain and Ireland to the American South and Appalachia, are depicted as some form of lovers’ quarrel, involving one man or, in some cases, one woman murdering his or her sweetheart, at least one exception can be made to the rule. “The Murder of the Lawson Family” is inspired by the true story of North Carolina sharecropper Charles Lawson, who 22

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murdered his wife and six of his seven children on Christmas Day, 1929, before taking his own life. His motives were all but inexplicable but caused immediate speculation about his mental state. The Twin-City Sentinel, in the following day’s edition, reported that Charles was “believed to have become suddenly insane.”7 The first appearance of this ballad came as soon as 1930, recorded by the Carolina Buddies, then again in 1956 by the Stanley Brothers, as “The Story of the Lawson Family.”8 This story may have also inspired Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” written in 1962 and released on his 1964 album The Times They Are A-Changin’, in which a destitute South Dakota farmer kills his wife and five children before turning the final shotgun shell on himself. “Your baby’s eyes look crazy, they’re a-tuggin’ at your sleeve / You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe,” Dylan sings, and one can imagine the narrator of “Song of Joy” wondering the same thing about his own Hilda, Hattie, and Holly, with their melancholic eyes. Although Charles Lawson and Hollis Brown took their own lives and did not live to see their crimes preserved in song, the narrator of “Song of Joy” can be seen as their successor, albeit one with much larger sights, bigger dreams of notoriety and, of course, better versed in classic literature.

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2 Stagger Lee

He was a bad man. Some say he was a gambler and a pimp. Some say he was a trickster, a shapeshifter. Others say he sold his soul to the devil, in exchange for a magical John B. Stetson hat, which granted him supernatural powers. And some folks say the devil was so scared of him, he let him take over hell, where he has ruled to this day. Whoever he was, one thing was certain: Stagger Lee was not a man to be trifled with. The legend of Stagger Lee (or Stackalee, Stagolee, Stag Lee, or Stack O’Lee) began near the start of the twentieth century, when variations of his name first started making the rounds of gambling dens, saloons, levee work crews, prisons, and chain gangs. Musicians composed songs in his honor, singers sang his praises, outlaws and criminals canonized him as a patron saint. But though no one knew his real name, or if he had ever existed, they knew his deeds—or most of them. What they didn’t know, they made up, adding to his exploits, until his legend grew exponentially. His name floated along the Mississippi River, from the Midwest down to New

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Orleans, where the stevedores, longshoremen, and hustlers all adopted him as their own. Though the details have been revised, distorted, and exaggerated over the course of a century, with innumerable performances and recordings, the basics are this: a man called Stagger Lee walks into a bar, gets into an argument with another man named Billy Lyons (or Billy DeLyon, Billy the Lion, or Billy Dilly), either over a Stetson hat or a card game. Stagger Lee shoots Billy dead, then calmly turns and exits the bar. In some versions, Stagger Lee is arrested and hanged for his deed, while in other tellings, Stagger Lee’s fate is inconclusive, allowing him to live in eternal infamy. Nick Cave, explaining his decision to record this song, said, “I like the way the simple, almost naïve traditional murder ballad has gradually become a vehicle that can happily accommodate the most twisted acts of deranged machismo.”1 As we’ve seen in “Song of Joy,” and as we’ll see elsewhere, Cave’s aim to write “evil songs” on Murder Ballads was a foremost concern. Though he had included many evil or deranged songs on earlier albums, his preoccupation with the subject on Murder Ballads could reflect the times in which it was recorded: the era of wantonly violent movies, zealous militia movements and separatist hostility permeating American news, and the excesses of gangsta rap and heavy metal. A character like Stagger Lee wouldn’t lack for company in this turbulent decade. “Just like Stagger Lee himself,” Cave said, “there seems to be no limits to how evil this song can become.”2 26

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Distinct from other American folk heroes such as Casey Jones, Davy Crockett, or Jesse James, Stagger Lee has been historically connected to African American communities. As Cecil Brown writes in Stagolee Shot Billy, Stagger Lee represents the “bad nigger” archetype, the fearless black man who takes what he wants, isn’t intimidated by the law, and gets away in the end. Stagger Lee, writes Brown, “is a metaphor that structures the life of black males from childhood through maturity.” In his 1975 book Mystery Train, critic and historian Greil Marcus calls Stagger Lee “a story that black America has never tired of hearing and never stopped living out, like whites with their Westerns.”3 But while the story is usually told as a fable or parable, the legend of Stagger Lee began with a real man: Lee Shelton, of St. Louis, Missouri. After the end of the Civil War, thousands of African Americans migrated north, seeking greater opportunity. The population in St. Louis swelled, while businessmen, city officials, lawyers, and street hustlers all sought favor and advantage in the growing city.4 Lee Shelton was a man of many talents. He was a carriage driver, a waiter, and a captain in a political and social club of ill repute. He was also allegedly a pimp and a gambling room owner, and he may have used his legitimate occupations to promote his illicit ones. St. Clair Avenue, in East St Louis, was home to an array of saloons and brothels, with names like the Monkey Cage, Uncle John’s Pleasure Palace, and the Bucket of Blood. Shelton was reportedly a member of a group of pimps known as “macks,” as famous for their flamboyant fashion as they were for their ruthlessness.5 27

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Lee’s nickname, with all its distinct spellings, could have derived from any number of places. Some sources report him as “Stag” Lee, possibly in reference to a sexually potent male or a man who travels alone to social events. Father-son folklorists John and Alan Lomax maintain that Lee acquired his nickname from the Lee Steamship line, owned by the Lee family of Memphis, piloted up and down the Mississippi River in the years following the Civil War, by a former Confederate soldier, gambler, and philanderer named Samuel Stacker Lee.6 Shields McIlwaine, in his 1948 book, Memphis Down in Dixie, offers the possibility of yet another riverboat captain, a light-skinned black man calling himself Stack Lee, claiming to be the illegitimate son of the white Stack Lee. McIlwaine writes that, because of Stack Lee’s reputation and renown, there were “more colored kids named Stack Lee than there were sinners in hell.”7 In St. Louis’s red-light district of Deep Morgan, two bars were in bitter competition, both commercially and politically. The Bridgewater Saloon was owned by Henry Bridgewater, a prominent Republican and one of the wealthiest black men in St. Louis. The saloon owned by Bill Curtis was patronized by Democrats. Curtis’s saloon was a rowdy place, often frequented by Shelton. Its patrons were “the lower class of river men and other darkies of the same social status,” according to a February 1891 edition of the St. Louis PostDispatch.8 Confrontations and brawls were routine between clientele of the two saloons. On Christmas night, 1895, William “Billy” Lyons and his friend Henry Crump walked the few blocks from Bridgewater’s saloon to Curtis’s saloon. As though predicting 28

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trouble, Lyons paused before entering, to borrow a knife from Crump. The two men then went inside and ordered drinks. Shortly after, Shelton entered the bar. “Who’s treating?” he called out.9 Lee Shelton was not a large man, standing about five foot seven.10 He was born in Texas on March 16, 1865, making him thirty years old on this Christmas night. He was lightskinned, and had two scars on his right cheek, two scars on the back of his head, one scar on his left shoulder blade, and a crooked left eye.11 He was dressed in his finest livery that night, complemented by his expensive Stetson hat. Shelton and Lyons, who were already acquainted, greeted each other amicably, celebrating the holiday together in a festive mood. The two men soon began to talk politics, and that’s when things took a turn. Shelton and Lyons started to fight, and Shelton damaged Lyons’s derby hat. Lyons then grabbed Shelton’s hat and refused to hand it back. Shelton struck Lyons on the head with a .44 Smith & Wesson and threatened to shoot him unless he gave him his hat back. Lyons took out the knife he’d borrowed from Crump and told Shelton, “You cockeyed son of a bitch, I’m going to make you kill me.” Shelton shot Lyons, walked over to Lyons, and grabbed his Stetson. “Nigger, I told you to give me my hat,” he said. Shelton then turned and walked out of the bar.12 After Shelton shot Lyons, he gave his gun to his landlady, headed upstairs to his room, and went to sleep. He was awakened by the police and arrested at three o’clock that morning. Lyons died in the hospital an hour later from loss of blood.13 Shelton was brought to the coroner’s office for 29

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Lyons’s inquest. Though this was only one of five murders that took place on Christmas night in St. Louis,14 Shelton’s trial commanded considerable attention, on account of the men involved, its presumed political motivations, and the ruthlessness of the killing. Shelton hired the prominent lawyer, Nathaniel Dryden. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, but at his retrial, in 1897, Shelton was found guilty of murder and sentenced to the penitentiary in Jefferson City, Missouri. By that time, the story of the bad man Stagger Lee had already begun to spread far beyond the borders of St. Louis. The earliest written mention of a song bearing Stagger Lee’s name appeared in the Kansas City Leavenworth Herald on August 21, 1897, in a brief promotional plug for “Prof. Charlie Lee, the piano thumper,” who was scheduled to “play ‘Stack-a-Lee’ in variations at the K.C. Negro Press association.”15 In February 1910, a woman from Texas named Ella Fisher sent John Lomax eight stanzas of “The Ballad of Stagalee,” writing that “this song is sung by the Negroes on the levee while they are loading and unloading the river freighters, the words being composed by the singers.”16 It made its first published appearance in 1911, in the Journal of American Folklore, and was recorded commercially for the first time in 1923, by two white dance groups, Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and Frank Westphal and His Orchestra. Ma Rainey and her band recorded “Stack O’Lee Blues” in 1926.17 Versions of the song began to spread through the North and South, with recordings by Furry Lewis, Professor Longhair, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Woody Guthrie. 30

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Few recordings were identical and even fewer bothered with historical facts. In some songs, Stagger Lee had not only killed Billy Lyons but also killed the bartender. In some tellings, Billy Lyons was the bartender. Some singers offered a cameo to Shelton’s girlfriend, Nellie (or Lilly), who rushes to his defense. Others gave Billy Lyons’s three children a mention (Lyons was, in fact, father to three children,18 though some singers only gave him two). The name of the bar, too, was at times changed to the Bucket of Blood, after the real St. Louis brothel, not far from Curtis’s saloon. Some had Shelton and Lyons feuding over a craps game, culminating with Lyons down on his knees, begging for his life, as in Mississippi John Hurt’s influential 1928 recording. Hurt’s rendition became one of the most widely emulated arrangements, with its rhymed couplet, followed by the refrain—“That bad man, cruel Stack O’ Lee”—reminding the listener that Lee was, indeed, a bad character. But not every singer copied this formula. In 1959, Lee had his biggest hit with Lloyd Price’s rhythm-and-blues song, “Stagger Lee,” which went to number one on the Billboard Pop Charts, backed by a lively female chorus shouting, “Go, Stagger Lee!”19 By the 1960s, writes Cecil Brown, Stagger Lee came to represent a new sense of power and identity for young black males, especially after James Brown and the Isley Brothers recorded their own takes on the celebrated figure. During this same time, Stagger Lee became a hero of “toasts,” the boastful and usually lewd storytelling form, created and passed on orally by America’s black youth, or recited by black men in pool halls and street corners. “In reciting the Stagolee toast, the speaker ‘performed’ Stagolee, taking on the hero’s 31

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character along with the role,” Brown writes. “The toast became an instrument enabling young black men to assert themselves as bullies and bad men, and thus to be powerful and charismatic.”20 In 1969, a musical novelty group calling themselves Snatch and the Poontangs, featuring Johnny Otis and his sixteen-year-old son, Shuggie, released a record of sexually explicit and swaggering blues songs. On the record is a track called “The Great Stack A Lee,” which drew directly from these toasts, particularly one recited in 1967 by Big Stick, an inmate at New York State’s Auburn Prison, who included this memorable line: He said, “Well bartender it’s plain to see I’m that bad motherfucker named Stagger Lee.”21 Another track on the Snatch and the Poontangs record, “Two Time Slim,” is a straightforward blues-guitar-backed toast, narrated by a character calling himself “Bam Bim, Two Time Slim, the High Sheriff sent from Hell.” Toward the end of this track, after five minutes of lewd boasts and threats, the narrator states, “I want you to excuse me for being so bold / But I’m the type of son of a bitch that’ll crawl over fifty good pussies to get to one fat boy’s asshole.” The “Stagger Lee” on Murder Ballads owes much more to these toasts than to the ballads recorded by Mississippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie, or Lloyd Price. But though “Stagger Lee” has become a staple of the Bad Seeds’ live set and a fan-favorite, it almost wasn’t included on the album. The Bad Seeds had finished wrapping the album sessions in Melbourne and had gone to London’s Wessex recording 32

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studio in March 1995 for overdubs. Jim Sclavunos brought with him to London a copy of a book he’d recently been given by his roommate in Los Angeles: The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler, an anthology of toasts published in 1976, edited by Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman. The book includes Big Stick’s Stagger Lee toast. “It was full of amazing stuff, one gem after another,” Sclavunos says. “I brought it with me to the London overdub sessions that we were doing with Kylie Minogue, and I presented it to Nick and said, ‘It’s probably too late now to consider any of this stuff, but I thought I should let you have a look at it anyway, because it’s really cool stuff.’ And he skimmed through it and lit upon Stagger Lee.” Though it was an “eleventh hour session,” as Sclavunos explains, the band gathered in the studio to see what they could come up with. Thomas Wydler had been the Bad Seeds drummer since 1985, but when the band went in to record the song, Wydler decided to sit this one out. Sclavunos remembers Wydler “handed me the sticks and said, ‘You do it.’” The drums on “Stagger Lee” are minimal and unembellished, with Sclavunos relying almost exclusively on kick and snare, which gives the song a rhythm more akin to funk or hip-hop. Musically, the Bad Seeds’ “Stagger Lee” bears little resemblance to either the folk ballads of Mississippi John Hurt, the rhythm-and-blues of Lloyd Price, or the jump-blues of Snatch and the Poontangs. When coming up with a melody for the song, the Bad Seeds were inspired by a much more contemporary source: Houston, Texas rap group, the Geto Boys. 33

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Comprised of rappers Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill, the Geto Boys were a confrontational and controversial group, with ultra-violent lyrics and themes, often using brutally candid language to document life in the black community in 1990s America. The Bad Seeds had been listening to a lot of Geto Boys during the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. Sclavunos says the Geto Boys were the band’s “summer soundtrack on the tour bus,” and Mick Harvey calls the group “rather great, actually, in their weird way.” But bass player Martyn P. Casey may have been the biggest fan, especially of Scarface’s third solo album, The Diary, released in 1994. When the Bad Seeds entered the London studio to work on an arrangement for “Stagger Lee,” Cave told Casey to “play something sexy and evil.”22 Casey’s resulting bassline—deep, rhythmic, and funky—sounds like it could’ve come directly from The Diary. After coming up with the bassline, keyboard player Conway Savage added his part, building on the mood that Casey had established. “We had a really big, long piano, a big bastard, and I hit the lowest ‘D’ I could find on that,” Savage said. “The whole room shook.”23 With Casey on bass, Savage on piano, Sclavunos on drums, Cave on vocals, Harvey on rhythm guitar, and Blixa Bargeld adding distorted guitar strokes, like punctuated knife stabs, the band recorded only two takes of “Stagger Lee.” The second take was chosen, becoming the last-recorded track for Murder Ballads, included almost as an afterthought. “Stagger Lee appeals to me simply because so many people have recorded it,” Cave said. “The reason why we did 34

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it, apart from finding a pretty good version of it in this book [The Life], was that there is already a tradition. We’re kinda adding to that.”24 “What I like about it,” he continued, “is that Stagger Lee’s atrocious behaviour has nothing to do with anything but flatout meanness, nothing but Bad Motherfuckerishness.”25 Hundreds of singers and musical groups have interpreted the Stagger Lee story over the last century. In addition to the above, the list also includes the likes of Wilson Pickett, Ike and Tina Turner, Taj Mahal, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Pat Boone, Grateful Dead, The Clash, Beck, and The Black Keys. On his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, Bob Dylan’s “Stack A Lee” mimics white guitar player Frank Hutchinson’s 1927 arrangement. In the 2006 film Black Snake Moan, actor Samuel L. Jackson performs a particularly raunchy version, inspired by the toasts, while the white actress Christina Ricci writhes and gyrates to sexual ecstasy inside a Southern juke joint. Though the Bad Seeds are far from the only white musicians to adopt the Stagger Lee legend, its connection to the black community shouldn’t be overlooked or dismissed. While for some audiences Stagger Lee is a humorous and irreverent yarn, or exemplifies the American outlaw character like Jesse James or Josey Wales, for black men in America, Stagger Lee has long represented defiance, virility, and black manhood. Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, gave his son the name Stagolee because “Stagolee was a bad nigger off the block and didn’t take shit from nobody.”26 When 35

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rapper Tupac Shakur was arrested in 1993 after shooting two off-duty Georgia police officers, NME reported how Shakur’s fans championed him as “a black hero in the tradition of the blues archetype Stagger Lee, who created a system for himself based on his own perceptions.”27 But back in the early twentieth century, before Stagger Lee had become an archetype, a hero, or a legend, while singers and musicians were beginning to put his deeds to song, the real Lee Shelton was still very much alive. After serving only ten years of a twenty-five-year sentence, Shelton, possibly with the help of his powerful friends in the local Democratic party, was paroled on Thanksgiving 1909 and walked out of the Missouri State Penitentiary a free man.28 Freedom didn’t last long. A few years later, in January 1911—the same year the first published lyrics regarding Stagger Lee appeared in the Journal of American Folklore— Shelton broke into the home of William Atkins and shattered his skull with a revolver. Again, he was arrested, and on May 7 he was sent back to the penitentiary. Shelton was sentenced to five years, but was again pardoned, by the next governor, Governor Herbert S. Hadley. On March 11, 1912, before Shelton could again walk out of prison, he succumbed to tuberculosis in the prison hospital.29 Lee Shelton was forty-six years old. He lived a criminal’s life and died a prisoner’s death. But Shelton would be immortalized as Stagger Lee, the baddest motherfucker to ever be celebrated in song.

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3 Henry Lee

The United States in the 1950s was a nation in flux. Having emerged victorious from the Second World War, Americans now saw rapid economic growth, advances in science and technology, and a formidable military. But the nation was also in the early years of the Cold War, and the fear of communism instilled a near-compulsion to consume.1 Americans in the postwar decade bought houses, televisions, and automatic toasters. They purchased American automobiles. They churned out loads of American babies. The government also developed and tested a hydrogen bomb, one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. President Dwight D. Eisenhower adopted the doctrine of massive retaliation, promoting the military theory of mutually assured destruction.2 In this national atmosphere, a mysterious collection of records began circulating among the country’s youth, like some alien artifact dropped into American cities. In 1952, the

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same year the hydrogen bomb wiped an entire island off the earth, Folkways Records released the Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-LP collection of eighty-four songs that had originally been recorded between 1926 and 1933 throughout Appalachia and the American South. The anthology was a patchwork of American music, consisting of early blues and country music, hillbilly songs, jug bands, novelty music, Cajun dance songs, hymns, and sermons. There were songs about murder, robbery, devastation and ruin, and railroad men who “drink up your blood like wine.” It was a glimpse into the nation’s bygone era, what Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” “The Anthology was a mystery,” writes Marcus, “an insistence that against every assurance to the contrary, America was itself a mystery.”3 The music on the anthology was as peculiar and enigmatic as the person responsible for compiling it. Harry Smith—Oregon-born filmmaker, folklorist, anthropologist, and lifelong bohemian—spent years traveling through the American South, collecting obscure and virtually forgotten 78 rpm records. He offered his collection to the folk music record label Folkways Records in 1947, and personally designed the anthology’s sequencing, packaging, and artwork. The Anthology consisted of three two-record sets, divided into three volumes: “Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs,” based on Smith’s mostly subjective criteria. Because of its novelty, its otherworldliness, and its utter disregard for conventions of the day, The Anthology achieved a sort of cult status among a younger generation of musicians, including Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. 38

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“The Anthology was our bible,” folk singer Dave Van Ronk said. “We all knew every word of every song on it.” “It gave us contact with musicians and cultures we wouldn’t have known existed,” said John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers.4 In his book on the North American folk revival, When We Were Good, Robert S. Cantwell states that it is in the Harry Smith anthology where “we can view the birth of a counterculture.”5 The cover of each volume depicted an engraving by English mystic Robert Fludd of the Celestial Monochord, a fantastical instrument representing the relationship between music, mathematics, and the cosmos. Each of the three volumes also contained a booklet written and designed by Smith, comprised of assorted bibliography, discography, etchings, old advertisements, and Smith’s short and irreverent descriptions of each song. For the murder ballad “Ommie Wise,” (spelled “Omie Wise” in most other versions) performed by fiddle player G.B. Grayson, Smith writes: “Greedy girl goes to Adams Spring with liar; lives just long enough to regret it.” The opening song on the Anthology, on the “Ballads” record, is sung by a white, blues guitar player named Dick Justice. In his description of the song, Smith summarizes it thus: “Scorning offer of costly trappings, bird refuses aid to knight thrown in well by lady.” The name of the song is “Henry Lee.” In December 1994, Jim Sclavunos brought a book of folk songs to a Murder Ballads recording session at Melbourne’s Sing Sing recording studio. “Henry Lee” was one of the songs 39

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included but, according to Sclavunos, Nick Cave brushed the book aside. “I pointed it out to Nick,” Sclavunos says. “It had some tablature in it for ‘Henry Lee,’ and I presented it to Nick, but I don’t know if he even acknowledged it. At some point, the book disappeared.”* Dick Justice’s recording of “Henry Lee,” in the Harry Smith anthology, was not the first, nor was it the only performance of this song. Its title, as well as many of its themes and lyrics, has been altered and adapted since its earliest documented appearance in the eighteenth century, in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads anthology, commonly known as the Child ballads. Comprised of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, beside their American variants, English and Scottish Popular Ballads is the work of American folklorist and scholar Francis James Child. First published in the late nineteenth century as a multivolume compendium, Child’s anthology is considered the most complete and influential collection of British ballads, consisting of ballads principally from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like Harry Smith almost a century later, Child catalogued each entry numerically, ascribing each ballad an identifying number. Number 68 is a Scottish ballad called “Young Hunting,” which, after making its way to other regions, came to be known by other names. In England it was known as Five years after this recording session, during a 1999 live performance for BBC’s Songwriters’ Circle, Cave introduces “Henry Lee” as “an old Scottish murder ballad that I read in a book somewhere and played around with.” *

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“Earl Richard” or “The Proud Girl.” In the United States in the early twentieth century, it became known as “The False Lady,” “Song of a Lost Hunter,” “Love Henry,” or “Henry Lee.” In the original printed ballad collected by Child, “Young Hunting” tells the tale of a young knight, the titular Young Hunting, who rides on horseback to meet his mistress, to inform her that he loves another woman: O lady, rock never your young son young One hour longer for me For I have a sweetheart in Garlick’s Wells I love thrice better than thee His mistress convinces Young Hunting to enter her home, where she proceeds to get him drunk on “the good ale and the beer.” She brings Young Hunting to bed, then promptly stabs him to death with “a little penknife.” She then looks up and notices a small bird flying above her head, an unanticipated witness to her crime. She attempts to sweet-talk the bird into flying down to her hand, offering promises of gifts. The bird, recognizing it as a trap, refuses: I winna light down, I shanna light down I winna light on thy hand; For soon, soon wad ye do to me As ye done to Young Hunting The woman drops the knight’s body into a deep well. As the king and his men go in search of Young Hunting, the same bird appears again, informing the men of the murder, then tells them they can find his body by the ethereal light of brightly burning candles. The king and his men find the 41

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candles, retrieve Young Hunting’s body, then go and prepare a bonfire in which to burn the mistress. When they find her, she claims another woman, May Catheren (or Maid Catheren), was responsible for the murder. The men find Catheren and throw her into the fire, but the flames don’t burn her, which they interpret as proof of her innocence. They remove Catheren and throw Young Hunting’s mistress into the bonfire, where she promptly burns to death. By the time it had made its way to the American South and Appalachia, many of the ballad’s supernatural elements had been pared down, but though the revelatory candles and the fateful bonfire had all but disappeared from later versions, the speaking bird remained a recurring motif. Between 1914 and 1916, English folklorists Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell collected six variants of “Young Hunting,” in North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.6 In each telling, the woman, after committing the murder, is provoked by the bird (sometimes identified as a parrot), who refuses to be lured by the woman’s promises of a beautiful cage made of gold and ivory. While talking animals are often found in the Child ballads, they aren’t as typical in their American counterparts, so the preservation of this bird in “Young Hunting” is notable. But are we to understand it literally as an anthropomorphic bird, having a casual conversation with a young murderess? Or are we instead to think of this bird symbolically, like Edgar Allen Poe’s raven? Does the bird speak as the woman’s guilty conscience, her grief, her descent into madness? In some variants, the bird continues to taunt the woman, as it does

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in this exchange sung by Mrs. Jane Gentry of Hot Springs, North Carolina, on August 25, 1916: I wish I had my bow and arrow, My arrow and my string; I’d shoot you through your tender little heart, For you never no more could sing. I wish you had your bow and arrow, Your arrow and your string; I’d fly away to the heavens so high Where I could for evermore sing.7 On his 1962 album Traditional Songs and Ballads of Appalachia, Frank Proffitt’s a cappella “Song of a Lost Hunter” does away completely with all supernatural or otherworldly motifs and offers instead a straightforward murder ballad. One year later, singer Judy Henske was recorded delivering a long, incongruous, and rather grating comedy monologue before giving a haunting rendition of “Love Henry.” But Dick Justice’s 1929 recording was the most emulated by American musicians in later decades, due to its inclusion in the Anthology of American Folk Music. Bob Dylan’s “Love Henry,” on his 1993 album of traditional folk songs, World Gone Wrong, and Cave’s own version, particularly the opening verses, owe a great deal to Justice’s “Henry Lee.” Cave, however, strips the story of all supernatural elements; rather than a dialogue between murderer and bird, this bird lands wordlessly on Henry’s lifeless body, as though to bless it or to watch over it and mourn his death.

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While writing the lyrics for Murder Ballads, Cave had been in regular contact with his friend, the late Mick Geyer, an Australian radio broadcaster, amateur musicologist, and a mentor to younger musicians. Geyer owned the Harry Smith anthology and dubbed various cassette tapes for Cave, certainly including Justice’s “Henry Lee.” But aside from sharing a similar ¾ time signature, the Bad Seeds diverged from Justice’s arrangement, and all other existing recordings of “Henry Lee.” The band’s musical arrangement was unplanned and impromptu. Mick Harvey explains how the music for “Henry Lee” was “simply us playing ‘The Curse of Millhaven’ really slowly.” After the music was recorded and scratch vocals were added, Cave sent demos of both “Henry Lee” and “The Curse of Millhaven” to English musician Polly Jean Harvey, letting her choose which song she’d like to sing. Cave had envisioned Harvey singing one or the other as lead vocalist. She responded that she wanted to do “Henry Lee,” as a duet with Cave. Harvey was an accomplished singer and musician by the time of the Murder Ballads recording sessions, having released three solo albums, including the critically acclaimed To Bring You My Love, released one year before Murder Ballads and featuring musical contributions by Bad Seeds member Mick Harvey (no relation).† When she and Cave

“Down by the Water,” the lead single from To Bring You My Love, is interpreted as the story of a mother drowning her daughter, and references the early-twentieth-century folk song “Salty Dog Blues.” †

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sang together on “Henry Lee,” it was their first professional collaboration. The music video for “Henry Lee” was shot on Friday, January 5, 1996, at Bow Studios, in Stratford, London, and directed by American photographer and music video director Rocky Schenck. Schenck and Cave discussed different concepts for the music video, when it was uncertain whether Harvey would be available for the shoot. One idea had a cast of children “auditioning” for the roles of “Nick” and “PJ,” dressed as their characters and lip-syncing the song lyrics. But when Harvey confirmed her availability, they decided on a straight performance piece, with she and Cave seated next to each other on a low bench, dressed and styled identically. Wearing matching black blazers over white, opencollared shirts, with the same long, jet-black hair, the two singers appear as twins, as androgynous doppelgängers, or as incestuous siblings. Cave and Harvey gaze into each other’s eyes, caress each other’s hands, stroke each other’s faces, and seem as if in genuine, mortal agony. Though it appears as though their performance is improvised, Harvey had written extensive notes before the shoot, with ideas regarding her character’s motivation. “She put great thought into her performance,” Schenck says. “On when to stroke Nick’s face, or look away, including the exact moment where she kisses Nick on the cheek on the line ‘plugged him.’” After rehearsing the choreography, Cave, Harvey, and the film crew spent the day shooting takes of their performances, trying out different camera angles. A single-shot take, from early in the day, proved to be the most memorable. 45

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“I stood next to my camerawoman [Lisa Rinzler] and gave cues to the grip when to dolly forward and backward, and watched the monitor as the scene unfolded, amazed at the flawless  performances and camera work,” Schenck says.  “I remember the crew bursting into applause when I yelled ‘cut,’ because we all felt we had witnessed something extraordinary and magical—a hypnotic and sensual performance by Nick and PJ, and brilliant camera work by the cinematographer.” Though the two singers had met in person only once before, in the recording studio, “their chemistry together was electric and palpable,” Schenck remembers. “It appeared to me that they were falling in love before my eyes.” “That’s a one-take video,” Cave said. “Nothing is rehearsed at all except we sit on this ‘love seat.’ We didn’t know each other well, and this thing happens while we’re making the video. There’s a certain awkwardness, and afterwards it’s like, oh . . .”8 The ensuing romance between Cave and Harvey was passionate, public, and brief, lasting only four months, until Harvey abruptly ended it. Cave channeled his heartbreak into the next Bad Seeds album, 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, with several songs alluding to his relationship with Harvey and the pain he’d felt on her sudden departure. Cave was devastated and wounded. It must’ve felt as though she’d stabbed him in the heart with a penknife.

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4 Lovely Creature

He arrives at the young woman’s door, usually in the evening and always alone. He greets her with flattering words, commenting on her beauty, her innocence, and especially her chasteness, then asks her to accompany him on a pleasant twilight stroll, either along the river, through a valley, or deep into the woods. The young woman obliges. After journeying for some time, she perceives his real intentions and weeps and begs for her life. Ignoring her pleas, the man methodically murders her, disposes of her body—either in a pre-dug grave or in the river—then coolly walks away. The end. This same sad story has been repeated in numerous murder ballads found in Appalachia and the American South since at least the late nineteenth century, including (to name a few) “Poor Ellen Smith,” “Omie Wise,” “Tom Dooley,” “Banks of the Ohio,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “Knoxville Girl,” and “Delia’s Gone.” The words are as familiar to Americans as the “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Author Norm Cohen observes how, “Murdering a sweetheart, rather than marrying her, is the basis of so many American ballads

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that foreigners must wonder whether this is our national pastime.”1 Though it has long been considered an American standard, the murder ballad “Pretty Polly”—what musician Marisa Anderson calls “the quintessential murder ballad”2—has roots tracing back to eighteenthcentury England, over a century before making its way to American shores. Originally known as “The Gosport Tragedy: or, The Perjured Ship-Carpenter,” the ballad began its life as a broadside circulating among the British Isles.3 Consisting of a series of couplets, broadsides were massproduced media of choice, distributed widely throughout London and Ireland between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Printed and sold cheaply on a large, single sheet of paper, a broadside disseminated up-to-date news, social events, gossip, announcements, and crime reports. In the United Kingdom, broadsides would be peddled at public executions, recounting the specifics of the crime in meticulous, grandiloquent, hyperbolic (and not always entirely accurate) detail, often narrated in the fictional firstperson voice by the murderer, and typically conclude with a warning for others not to make the same mistakes as the condemned narrator. Any apparent moral significance to be found in a broadside or ballad, however, is usually a later addition or revision, explains Nick Groom, professor of literature in English at the University of Macau and author of The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. “These rewritings began in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century,” Groom says. “They are the result of more serious and academic attention 48

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being paid to ballads (often by clergymen), and therefore more attention being given to policing the morality and possible effects of popular culture. So these morals are frequently tacked on by later editors, conforming to the values of their own time, rather than reflecting the amoral and godless lawlessness of the earlier versions.” This is where these ballads differ from their contemporary appropriations: where a murder ballad from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would conclude with some moral lesson or word of caution to the listener, their modern variants, including Cave’s, largely do away with any moral significance, leaving the murder to stand for itself and the listener to make his or her own verdict. “The Gosport Tragedy” tells the tale of a young ship carpenter named William, who asks a beautiful damsel named Molly for her hand in marriage. Molly is diffident, suspicious that William is only trying to take advantage of her youth and chastity, and that William will be too often away at sea to care for a wife and family. William continues to flatter and makes promises to Molly, and the ballad goes on to state how “at length with his cunning he did her betray / to lewd desire he led her away.” Molly learns she is pregnant with William’s child, but he is soon summoned by the king to set sail aboard a warship. Before William departs, Molly reminds him of his promise to marry her. William reassures her, saying they will marry tomorrow. The next morning Molly goes to meet William, and he tells her that before they can marry, they have to first go and visit his friend. Molly agrees, but as they embark on their journey, she becomes suspicious: 49

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He led her through valleys and groves so deep, At length this maiden began for to weep; Saying, William, I fancy thou leadst me astray, On purpose my innocent life to betray. When William confesses that he’d been up all night digging her grave, Molly pleads with him to spare her life: Her hands white as lilies in sorrow she wrung, Beseeching for mercy, saying, what have I done To you my dear William, what makes you severe? For to murder one that loves you so dear. William stabs her with a knife, drops her body into the grave, and covers her with dirt, “leaving none but birds her death to mourn.” He then runs off, boards his ship, and prepares to depart for the sea. This is where “The Gosport Tragedy” begins to deviate considerably from its later, American counterpart, “Pretty Polly.” Before the ship leaves port, Molly’s ghost appears aboard, terrorizing the crew and haunting William. Lightning darts from her eyes as she shrieks and roars, demanding justice. The captain immediately rounds up his crew and demands to know if any of them have committed a murder. As Paul Slade writes in Unprepared to Die, there was a widespread belief among seamen of the day that sailing with a murderer on board invited doom to the ship.4 All the men, including William, deny having committed a murder, but when William turns to leave, he’s confronted again by Molly’s apparition. Terrified and repentant, he confesses his crime to the captain. William then falls to his death after 50

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feverishly raving throughout the night (in some tellings, William’s body is torn to pieces by the ghost). Molly’s grave is soon discovered, and her body is reinterred at a church in the town of Gosport, in Hampshire, on the south coast of England. The supernatural elements of this and other English medieval ballads were a sort of precursor to the gothic literature of late-eighteenth-century England. Like many of these medieval ballads, gothic literature deals in the macabre and the paranormal, the mysterious and otherworldly. But while ballads are imbued with allusions to the supernatural, they rarely, if ever, concern themselves with religious motivations. Though a ballad may conclude with some sort of moral plea to behave virtuously, it does not endorse any particular creed or even mention any type of deity. “The ballad genre doesn’t refer to God or the spiritual,” Groom says. “Ballads don’t refer to faith. They don’t deal in the metaphysical, but they do deal in the supernatural. They don’t have that sense of transcendence.” Throughout the nineteenth century, variants of “The Gosport Tragedy” appeared throughout the United Kingdom, often with only minor differences in location, dialogue, and title. By the time the song had become popularized in America, sometime in the early 1900s, Molly had already been called Polly intermittently for nearly a century. Slade writes of a Polly mentioned in “Love and Murder,” a Liverpool broadside from 1822.5 But not until August 1910, with a song called “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter,” sung by Hilliard Smith of Hindman, Kentucky, and collected by Sharp and Campbell, had 51

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there been any documentation of a “pretty Polly.”6 This new sobriquet caught on. John Hammond made the first commercial recording of “Pretty Polly” in 1925, and again as “Purty Polly” in 1927. Also in 1927, banjo players B.F. Shelton and Dock Boggs recorded their own versions of “Pretty Polly.” By this point, all of the supernatural elements of “The Gosport Tragedy”—the vengeful ghost, the haunted ship—had been erased. William (or “Willie”) is also no longer a ship carpenter. His profession is unknown, and his motivation for murdering Polly is obscure. Boggs’s version is singular in that he begins with a firstperson verse, explaining how he “used to be a rambler,” and he “stayed around in town,” as if this provided some clarification as to why he suddenly, inexplicably, felt compelled to rid himself of Polly. Boggs then goes on to pay tribute to his illfated sweetheart: Oh where is Pretty Polly, oh yonder she stands With rings on her fingers and lily-white hands Willie leads Polly “over hills and valleys so deep” and, as in the original eighteenth-century ballad, Polly cries and begs for her life, but Boggs, perhaps out of some sense of Southern propriety (or maybe simply to continue the “deep” and “weep” rhyming pattern), only allows that Polly “fell asleep.” After throwing dirt over Polly, Willie turns and walks to the river, “where the deep water flow.” Was Polly buried alive? Why did Willie murder her? Is the guilt-stricken and repentant Willie now going to throw himself into the river? These questions are never answered, and this is perhaps one of the biggest distinctions between 52

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English ballads and their American counterparts: where these ballads and broadsides could take as long as needed, stretching to many dozens of verses, American ballads, often recorded to a single side of a 78 rpm record, had much less time to tell the story. Often, these ambiguities lent the ballad an even more ominous, and thus more haunting, quality. Musician Rennie Sparks of the Handsome Family writes how “the magic is in the mystery, the parts left unsaid. Like the wordless, unspeakable parts of our own psyche, murder ballads hold secrets that loom larger the farther down they’re pushed. The more holes we cut in these songs, the more powerful they become.”7 “Pretty Polly” would go on to be interpreted and recorded by innumerable musicians, including the Stanley Brothers, the Byrds, John Fahey, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan. In 2014, during an episode of the television series “House of Cards,” Kevin Spacey’s character, the calculating and homicidal Frank Underwood, sings “Pretty Polly” to his wife and accomplice Claire. Like many murder ballads, not all singers who have covered “Pretty Polly” have been men. Judy Collins, Patty Loveless, Shirley Collins, Kristin Hersh, and others have recorded their takes on this ballad. Rennie Sparks maintains that the singer, whether male or female, is inconsequential to the true meaning of the ballad: “‘Pretty Polly’ isn’t really about a murder at all: it’s about our fear of sexual abandon and our fascination with our own mortality. It feels good to listen to the song because it lets a little air out of the volcano of our unconsciousness.”8 53

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When Nick Cave composed the lyrics to “Lovely Creature,” “Pretty Polly” served as a likely inspiration, but his opening verse, as well as the song’s title, references a different song altogether: “Yonder Stands a Lovely Creature,” collected and published in 1913 by English composer George Butterworth, from words sung by Mrs. Cranstone of Billingshurst, Sussex, around 1907: Yonder stands a lovely creature, Who she is I do not know: I’ll go and court her for her beauty, Let her answer, “yes” or “no” In “Lovely Creature,” Cave strips the ballad down to its core, introducing even more mystery and ambiguity. After the young woman agrees to follow the narrator, she is led over hills, mountains, and ranges. They pass “pyramids and sphinxes,” they meet “drifters and strangers.” We’re not given place names or locations, but we can be certain that we are far from the rolling hills of Hampshire or the bluegrass of Kentucky. The narrator of “Lovely Creature” and his companion brave “mad, moaning winds,” as nights are spent in the company of “diabolical things.” Similarities can be found in a Bad Seeds song from four years earlier, “Loom of the Land,” from 1992’s Henry’s Dream. In this song, the narrator leads a young girl, Sally, through woods, past churches, and “across the endless sands.” He doesn’t disclose the purpose or destination of their travels. “Loom of the Land” could be seen as simply a song about a destitute, nomadic couple, if not for the narrator’s off-handed mention of the knife he carries in his jeans. 54

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Cave once more refrains from showing us the actual murder in “Lovely Creature,” so we are left to wonder what exactly transpired. He only allows that he returned home alone, his companion no longer at his side, that she now lies underneath “slow drifting sands.” Her death and her final resting place are as unknown as her name. Though she has traveled across continents, oceans, centuries, and generations, celebrated by untold singers worldwide, who she is and why she had to die remain a mystery to this day.

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5 Where the Wild Roses Grow

In October 1995, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released the single “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” a duet between Cave and Australian pop star Kylie Minogue. The song topped music charts across the globe, going on to win in three categories of the 1996 Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards, for “Song of the Year,” “Single of the Year,” and “Best Pop Release.” It also brought the band their first invitation to appear on the BBC show Top of the Pops, where Cave was introduced to an entirely different audience than what he’d thus far been accustomed to. “I remember being in a toy shop getting a toy for my son,” Cave said, “and this little kid coming up to me in a Power Rangers outfit, and he goes, ‘Are you that old guy that was on with Kylie Minogue the other night?’ He was just this little kid, but he really loved the song. And I’m just like, [under his breath] ‘Oh fuck off, you little bastard.’ But it suddenly occurred to me that these people may even be buying the record, and it deeply troubled me.”1 While the collaboration between Cave and Minogue proved to be a fruitful one, it perplexed their respective

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fans. A former teen soap opera actor, Minogue later found a successful career as a pop singer, releasing her chart-topping debut album, Kylie, in 1988—the same year Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds released their fifth album, Tender Prey. Minogue was twenty-seven years old when she recorded with Cave, who was ten years her senior. Cave explained that he’d written the song “very much with Kylie in mind. I’d wanted to write a song for Kylie for many years. I had a quiet obsession with her for about six years. I wrote several songs for her, none of which I felt was appropriate to give her. It was only when I wrote this song, which is a dialogue between a killer and his victim, that I thought finally I’d written the right song for Kylie to sing. I sent the song to her and she replied the next day.”2 Cave had in fact first reached out to a mutual acquaintance, Minogue’s boyfriend Michael Hutchence, of Australian rock band INXS. “Michael said to me: ‘My friend Nick wants to do a song with you,’” Minogue recalled. “I didn’t know who Nick Cave was. And I just said: ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ like your nan would say: ‘Oh that’s nice, dear, do you want a cup of tea?’”3 After agreeing to sing on the song, Minogue prepared for her meeting with Cave by quickly reading Ian Johnston’s biography Bad Seed. Cave sent Minogue a demo CD of the song, with Bad Seeds guitar player Blixa Bargeld singing her parts.*

This performance, featuring Bargeld’s vocals, is included on the B-Sides & Rarities compilation. *

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Minogue and Cave met in person for the first time on January 18, 1995, when she entered the Metropolis recording studio in Melbourne. A dynamic and energetic vocalist, Minogue’s first attempts at the song were too florid, too showy. Minogue remembers Cave coaching her to “Make it smaller, smaller, smaller. Make it like you’re telling the story, you’re speaking it.”4 “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” released as a single that fall, became an instant hit, but Minogue’s followers remained suspicious of Cave. “I think, my fans, it took them a while to come to terms with that,” Minogue recalled. “There’s all these Kylie fans in the front, just growling at him. ‘Who are you?’ ‘Who’s that tall, scary man performing with her?’”5 “Where the Wild Roses Grow” was inspired by the ballad “Down in the Willow Garden,” in which a woman named Rose Connolly is murdered by her male suitor. Though once considered native to America, particularly the Appalachian region, the name Rose Connolly was first documented by Edward Bunting in his 1840 book, The Ancient Music of Ireland, who writes that he’d obtained the song in 1811 in the Irish town of Coleraine, “Author and date unknown.”6 More than five decades after Bunting’s book, at the close of the nineteenth century, Irish poet William Butler Yeats composed “Down by the Salley Gardens.” Inspired by the Anglo-Irish ballad “The Rambling Boys of Pleasure” (or “You Rambling Boys of Pleasure”), Yeats recalled first hearing the ballad sung by “an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo.”7 Comprised of just two short stanzas, Yeats’s poem begins: 59

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Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. In the second and final stanza, the anonymous narrator mourns his lost lover. He does not, however, murder her. The first documented appearance of “Rose Connoley” in the United States came in 1915 in West Virginia, where it was “popular in the oil fields of Wetzel County about 1895.”8 By this point, Yeats’s “salley gardens” had become a “willow garden.”† Folklorist and song collector Cecil Sharp later found variations of “Rose Connoley” in 1918 in Virginia and North Carolina,9 but the ballad was not recorded to disc until November 18, 1927, as “Rose Conley,” by guitar player Henry Whitter and blind fiddler G.B. Grayson.10 Performed as a waltz, the first verse mirrors Yeats’s opening stanza, with a young couple meeting for a romantic encounter in a willow garden. But here the ballad veers sharply from Yeats. The singer goes on to confess he’d given his love poisoned Burgundy (or “burglar’s”) wine. While she is dozing, he stabs her with a knife, then throws her body into the river. The killer is captured and sentenced to be executed. His father weeps in his cottage doorway, gazing up at his son standing on the scaffold. The singer, about to be hanged, ruefully accepts that hell awaits him, because he murdered “that pretty little miss / whose name is Rose Conley.” “Salley” derives from the Gaelic word for willow, “saileach.”

†

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In 1947, Charlie Monroe and His Kentucky Pardners recorded “Down in the Willow Garden,” which would become the group’s most requested song and the model for all successive versions.11 The ballad would go on to be recorded by such acts as the Stanley Brothers, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Art Garfunkel, and Jerry Garcia, among others. The preppy, pop-rock duo the Everly Brothers, who’d mastered the close harmonies of bluegrass performers, recorded a stripped-down, melancholy version of the ballad for their 1958 album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.‡ Though “Down in the Willow Garden” is its nearest and most obvious parallel, “Where the Wild Roses Grow” follows the established pattern of the “murdered sweetheart” ballads, including “Knoxville Girl,” popularized by country duo the Louvin Brothers. In this ballad, which also has origins in nineteenth-century Ireland, the singer, Willy, brutally beats his lover with a stick, drags her across the ground by her hair, then throws her body into the river. The difference between these ballads and “Where the Wild Roses Grow” is in their climax. In “The Knoxville Girl,” as with “Down in the Willow Garden,” the narrator expresses anguish over what he’d done. Willy, in “The Knoxville Girl,” relates how he’d “rolled and tumbled the whole night through, as troubles was for me.” The narrators of both “The Knoxville Girl” and “Down in During the Murder Ballads recording sessions, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recorded their take on the ballad, titling it “The Willow Garden,” featuring piano player Conway Savage on vocals and new Bad Seeds member Warren Ellis on violin. The song was issued as a B-side to the “Where the Wild Roses Grow” single and is also included on B-Sides & Rarities. ‡

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the Willow Garden” have already been arrested and tried, and they sing their ballads as if beginning a life sentence in a “dirty old jail,” in the former, or only moments away from being hanged, in the latter. In “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” however, the narrator has not been caught or condemned, and he doesn’t appear to be tormented by any feelings of regret or remorse. His final act, as we are led to see, is to simply place a rose between the teeth of the woman he’s just killed. Another difference between Cave’s song and other murdered sweetheart ballads is the reintroduction of the supernatural elements which had largely disappeared when the ballads made their way to North America. The murdered woman, Elisa Day, sings as if beyond the grave, offering her own voice and perspective. Unlike the vengeful ghost of the murdered Molly, in “The Gosport Tragedy,” Elisa seems to harbor no grudge against her killer. She can only ruminate why “they” refer to her as “the Wild Rose.” Do people in town know what terrible act happened on this site? Do visitors now flock to her grave, as a kind of dark tourism? Has an especially striking and untamed rose been growing from where Elisa’s blood was shed? This supernatural imagery—a rose growing from a grave—borrows from the ballad “Barbara Allen,” which scholars consider “the most widespread folk song in the English language.”12 Though not a murder ballad, “Barbara Allen” tells of a woman who scorns her lover, yet another William, who dies of heartbreak. Full of regret, Barbara, too, dies of sorrow. Her body is buried in the churchyard next to William’s, and “out of his grave grew a red, red rose / And out of hers a briar.” 62

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Though several murder ballads place a woman in the murderer’s role—“Frankie and Johnny,” “The Twa Sisters,” and “Henry Lee,” among them—the overwhelming majority of these ballads tell of a man killing a woman, usually an intimate lover—hapless, virginal, and naïve. In her 2011 study, “‘This Murder Done’: Misogyny, Femicide, and Modernity in 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads,” Christina Ruth Hastie writes that the murder ballads of nineteenth-century Appalachia reflect the rising tensions between established traditions and recent strides in American industrialism—a tension that was further aggravated by women’s nascent sexual independence and other “emerging notions of American modernism”: This tension is met with responses of violence against women whose life situations, marked by sexual freedom, are the very depiction of a new cultural modernism that threatens the hegemony of the past. In responding to social changes and sexual threats, the murder ballads demonstrate the vestiges of a highly codified social agenda—one both challenged and persistent, and one deeply rooted in the ideals and practices of misogyny and patriarchy.13 In her 2014 study of Nick Cave’s songwriting, “The Corpse Bride: Ideal Beauty and Domestic Degradation in the Work of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds,” Ingrid Fernandez writes that Cave’s music follows in this deeply rooted misogynistic tradition. Particularly focusing on Murder Ballads, Fernandez writes how the album “stands by the status quo,” 63

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persistently upholding a sexual double standard that denies women voice, will or volition. In the end, despite some elements of the subversive, especially in the use of voice and the confessional, Cave infects us with a theologically based approach to life that justifies the murder of pure, beautiful women as a natural condition because it cannot imagine an alternative to the climax of a romantic relation between a man and a woman once the sense of novelty begins to fade.14 Cave himself put it much more bluntly in a 1986 interview: “I’ve always enjoyed writing songs about dead women. It’s something that crops up that still holds some mystery, even to me.”15 Cave, of course, isn’t the first artist to sentimentalize dead women. Edgar Allen Poe’s famous quote about the death of a beautiful woman being “the most poetical topic in the world” is often removed from the context in which it was written and, as a result, reads as puerile and irresponsible, but it is beyond a doubt a subject that artists (particularly male artists) return to time and again. Whether music, poetry, fine art, or cinema, the death of a beautiful woman— the most poetical topic in the world or not—remains one of the most persistent, overworked, and marketable subjects in Western culture. A constant throughout murder ballads, whether the medieval or Romantic archetypes or their American counterparts, is that the ill-fated woman must be lured out to nature, either to the river or deep into the woods. The woman, then, not only represents man’s desire but also nature’s wild and untamed elements. Man has for thousands of years sought to tame nature rather than succumb to its

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power. Rather than exposing his vulnerabilities to nature’s feral sovereignty, he would blot it from existence. In the music video for “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” music video director Rocky Schenck combined natural scenery with ethereal and supernatural elements, inspired by John Everett Millais’s pre-Raphaelite painting Ophelia and Charles Laughton’s 1955 film Night of the Hunter. “My vision was to take a natural environment and manipulate it through lighting and set dressing, to resemble a beautifully executed but artificial movie set,” Schenck says. “An homage to the romanticized ‘exterior’ landscapes created inside sound stages of movie studios during the golden era of Hollywood.” The music video was shot near the village of West Peckham, Kent, in July 1995. Cave had initially wanted to shoot the video in a studio and suggested having one of his actor friends, Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt, play the male lead. Cave’s script told the story in reverse, beginning with Kylie’s bloodied corpse at the river’s edge, with a red rose growing out of her mouth.  The rose then disappears back into her mouth as the killer pushes her head under the water, and the video ends where the story begins, with the killer murdering Kylie with a rock. “The record company encouraged me to write a concept that would be more ‘MTV-friendly’ and less violent,” Schenck says. “So after several phone discussions with Nick, I wrote an alternative concept for the video, attempting to please both Nick and his record company.” In Schenck’s script, the video begins soon after the murder; the killing is never shown. Cave can be seen holding his face 65

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in grief, as though filled with a remorse that is otherwise nonexistent in the lyrics. Cave never looks at the camera, too distracted by regret and shame. Minogue, in contrast, inhabits two characters: the murdered and motionless Elisa Day in the river, and Elisa’s ghost, who confronts the viewer directly, as if implicating us for our voyeurism. The first fifteen seconds of the video are silent but for the sounds of nature—insects, frogs, water—as the camera slowly pans over a woman’s exposed body in the river.§ Minogue’s body, whether in the water or at the river’s edge, remains a focal point throughout the video, with Cave either caressing her or staring mutely at her lifeless form. He seems to want us to know that he is not to be blamed for Elisa’s death. She was too beautiful to live, and only in death can she become the perfect and ideal woman. As Rachael Baitch Zeleny writes, this music video establishes how male artists—particularly in the preRaphaelite era but continuing to the modern day—use their art as a means by which to observe and subdue women: “Although echoes of the femme fatale work to complicate the issue of Eliza’s [sic] passivity,” Zeleny writes, “Schenck’s video is primarily interested in exploring and utilising the male gaze—the convention that permits men to look and women to serve as objects for male visual pleasure.”16 A heated water tank was built for Minogue’s water scenes. “Kylie was never placed in the river,” Schenck says. “The water was simply too cold, so we used two different stand-ins for the wide angles. If you look closely, you can see one of the stand-ins—a very young girl—attempting to remain still, but we see her legs shaking and quivering.” §

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“Where the Wild Roses Grow” was an immediate commercial hit, owing much of its success to the music video’s steady airplay on MTV. Recounting this experience in 2013, Cave, somewhat facetiously, relates how “MTV, who had ignored me for twenty years, put this video on heavy rotation, and I was catapulted into the world of superstardom.”17 But when Cave learned he’d been nominated for the “Best Male Artist” category in 1996, he wrote a letter to MTV, “on one very stoned evening,” and asked his nomination to be withdrawn. “My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature,” Cave declared. “She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves—in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel—this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes.”18 Cave, then, could be seen as assigning more consideration and respect to his female muse than to his female characters. Elisa was far too extraordinary to go on living, but though Cave’s muse is equally “delicate,” and her nature is “fragile,” he is willing to sacrifice one in service to the other. Elisa is disposable; Cave’s muse is not. Minogue and Cave reunited with the Bad Seeds in 2014, when she joined the band during an intimate concert for the film 20,000 Days on Earth. Five years later, on June 30, 2019, Minogue would reciprocate by inviting Cave on stage 67

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to sing with her band at the Glastonbury Festival. Though nearly twenty-five years had passed since Cave and Minogue met for the first time and recorded their unlikely hit, the two singers embraced like long-lost lovers, as if returning from the dead to once again find each other.

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6 The Curse of Millhaven

Millhaven is a small city in Illinois. It’s a quiet, unassuming Midwestern city, like many Midwestern cities. Elm trees line the streets. The west and east sides of the city are divided by the Millhaven River, stitched together by the Horatio Street bridge. After graduating from high school, some students go on to find lasting careers in Millhaven’s can factories or tanneries. Snow falls in the middle of summer. Flights of angels blot out the sky. A former resident, Tim Underhill, describing Millhaven, relates how “once, on the near south side of town,” a band of children killed a stranger, dismembered him, and buried the pieces of his body beneath a juniper tree, and later the divided and buried parts of his body began to call out to each other; once a rich old man raped his daughter and kept her imprisoned in a room where she raved and drank, raved and drank, without ever remembering what had happened to her; once the pieces of the murdered man buried beneath the juniper tree called out and caused the children to bring them together;

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once a dead man was wrongly accused of terrible crimes. And once, when the parts of the dismembered man were brought together at the foot of the tree, the whole man rose and spoke, alive again, restored.1 Millhaven is a typical Midwestern city, in other words. It’s small and it’s mean and it’s cold. It is also fictitious. In 1993, Peter Straub published The Throat, the final book of his “Blue Rose” trilogy, following Koko and Mystery. The Throat is narrated by Vietnam veteran and acclaimed novelist Tim Underhill who, after receiving a distressing call from old friend and fellow vet John Ransom, returns to his hometown of Millhaven. There have been a series of murders in the city, and Ransom tells Underhill he believes his wife was the latest victim of a serial killer, who’s been imitating the unsolved murders that tormented Millhaven in the 1940s, in which the killer scrawled “Blue Rose” near the victims’ bodies. Underhill wrote a popular book about the murders, and Ransom enlists his friend’s aid to try and solve not only the copycat murders but the identity of the original Blue Rose killer. As the two men navigate Millhaven in search of clues, the seemingly tranquil and placid city comes into focus, and Millhaven reveals itself to be a city of dreadful characters. Straub based the fictional city on his hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, though he is quick to point out the subtle differences between the two cities: “A lot of the Milwaukee landscape can be found in beautiful little Millhaven,” writes Straub. “However, Millhaven has been home to a great many more serial killers than Milwaukee was ever blessed with. I like Millhaven, though, and in my mind I

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often stroll down its leafy streets, wondering where all those groans of agony are coming from.”2 A Millhaven resident named Walter Dragonette—a quiet and polite young man who rarely attracted notice from his neighbors—was soon discovered to be concealing the remains of nineteen or more corpses inside his house. Dragonette had lured young men to his home, brutally murdered them, then sodomized and cannibalized the corpses. He became known throughout the city as the “Meat Man.” He showed no remorse for his actions, even delighting over them, reveling in the local scandals brought about by his newfound notoriety. As Straub had based Millhaven on Milwaukee, Walter Dragonette could be seen as a surrogate for one of Milwaukee’s most infamous sons, Jeffrey Dahmer. In many respects, Millhaven, Illinois, is similar to Stephen King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Both are stand-ins for the authors’ native homes, and both maintain an illusion of normality and tranquility, while harboring mysteries and gruesome secrets. Nick Cave has admitted to being a fan of Straub’s books, but he confessed that appropriating the name of the fictional town hadn’t been deliberate. “I actually didn’t mean to do that with ‘Millhaven,’” Cave said. “I guess it sort of stuck in my head somehow and ended up in this song.”3 Even so, this wasn’t the first time Cave had borrowed from Straub’s work. In “Do You Love Me (Part 2),” from Let Love In, preceding Murder Ballads by two years, Cave had drawn from Straub’s short story, “The Juniper Tree,” in which a young boy is molested by an older man in a movie theater. The actor Berry Kroeger is described as possessing “sneaky eyes, girlish and 71

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watchful.” In “Do You Love Me (Part 2)” Cave depicts a boy being molested by a man in a theater with “sly, girlish eyes.” Musically, “The Curse of Millhaven” has little in common with other songs on Murder Ballads. With its shuffling rhythm and carnivalesque organ, and Warren Ellis providing madcap accordion and fiddle, “The Curse of Millhaven” is fast, spirited, and one might daresay festive. Bad Seeds bass player Martyn P. Casey calls the song “a sort of mad polka.”4 Cave sent a demo of the song to P.J. Harvey, along with a demo of “Henry Lee,” and asked her to choose which one she’d prefer to sing lead vocals on. “The Curse of Millhaven” might’ve been the obvious choice, as it’s told in the first person by a teenage girl, but Harvey suggested singing “Henry Lee” as a duet, which left Cave to assume the role of fourteen-year-old Loretta. Though Cave set this song in Straub’s invented city, there are no characters quite like Loretta in Straub’s book. The Millhaven of The Throat does harbor an above average number of sociopaths and serial killers, but they are all predictably older and male. Loretta—or Lottie, as she prefers—is unique. Not only is she a teenage girl, but she is particularly ruthless in her campaign. Among other deeds, she admits to bashing in the Blakey boy’s head before sinking him in the creek, decapitating Handyman Joe with a circular saw, and keeping the bodies of twenty children underneath her house. With her lack of remorse, lack of empathy, and extreme narcissism, Loretta exhibits all the signs of a psychopath. She kills not out of spite, or in order to obtain some desired object, but for the sport of it. Like Walter Dragonette in 72

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The Throat, when Loretta is finally captured, she freely confesses to all her crimes, and the only remorse she offers is that there was much more she could’ve done had she not been caught. While there have been plenty of stories of homicidal and sociopathic young girls—the fictional Merricat in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the unnamed narrator of Jo Imog’s The Demon Flower, or the real Lizzie Borden, who took an axe and gave her parents forty-odd whacks—Loretta’s closest counterpart, factual or imagined, might be eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark, from William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed. Rhoda is the charming and precocious only daughter of Christine and Kenneth Penmark. Though she’s polite and intelligent, other children tend to avoid her, and she’s been expelled from school for lying and stealing. The school principal, speaking with Christine, describes Rhoda as a “cold, self-sufficient, difficult child who lived by rules of her own, and not by the rules of others.”5 After a series of mysterious deaths begin to surround Rhoda, her mother suspects that Rhoda might be involved. Christine asks her friend Reginald Tasker, a psychiatric criminologist, for his opinion as to whether children could ever commit murder, or if it is something that only adults do. Tasker responds that “children quite often committed murders, and quite clever ones, too, at times. Some murderers, particularly the distinguished ones who were going to make great names for themselves, usually start in childhood; they show their genius early, just as outstanding poets, mathematicians, and musicians did.”6 73

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Christine’s father, passing through town, stops by the house to say hello. During this visit, Christine learns she’d been adopted as a child and her birth mother was notorious serial killer Bessie Denker, who’d been executed in an electric chair shortly after Christine’s birth. Following a tense and ostensibly hypothetical “nature versus nurture” discussion between Christine and Tasker, or whether homicidal tendencies are inherited like colorblindness or male-pattern baldness, Tasker sums up his thesis about these innately sociopathic children: “It’s just that they are bad seeds. Plain bad from the beginning. And nothing can change them.”7 The Bad Seed was adapted into a long-running Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson in 1954, which informed the Academy Award-winning 1956 film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. In both the Broadway production and the film, eleven-year-old actress Patty McCormack—with her severe bangs, meticulously braided pigtails, and cold, soulless eyes—plays Rhoda with exceptionally sinister precision. The similarities between Rhoda and Loretta are likely not a coincidence, considering Cave’s early band, the Birthday Party, named their 1983 EP The Bad Seed and, following that band’s dissolution, christened the new band the Bad Seeds. Cave clearly had Rhoda in his mind long before he’d created Loretta; now all he had to do was drop her into Millhaven and let her run amok. In 1968, a decade after The Bad Seed was published, an eleven-year-old girl named Mary Bell strangled to death two male toddlers in Scotswood, a district in Newcastle upon 74

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Tyne, in the northeast of England. Using a pair of scissors and a razor blade, Mary carved an “M” into one of the boy’s stomachs, cut his hair, and mutilated his genitals.8 After her arrest, while awaiting trial, Mary reportedly made such statements to guards and police officers such as, “I like hurting little things that can’t fight back,”9 and “Murder isn’t that bad. We all die sometime anyway.”10 The prosecutor, Rudolph Lyons, described Mary as acting “solely for the pleasure and excitement afforded by killing.”11 Psychiatrists said Mary displayed “classic symptoms of psychopathy.”12 The British press called her “evil born,”13 a tag that would make Rhoda and Loretta proud, but failed to take into account the emotional and physical abuse Mary was later found to have suffered at the hands of her mother.* Mary was convicted of manslaughter due to “diminished responsibility” (an English law that reduces a sentence from murder to manslaughter if the offender is deemed mentally unsound at the time of the crime), and she was released from Askham Grange prison in 1980, having served twelve years. She was twenty-three years old and she was granted permission to assume a new name and identity. She gave birth to a daughter four years after her release, but she and her daughter have been repeatedly forced to relocate after being discovered by the public, changing their names again and again.

Two reviews published in 1999, by the New York Times and Salon, of Gitta Sereny’s book about Mary Bell, Cries Unheard, were each given the respective headers, “A Bad Seed?” and “The bad seed.” *

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In 2009, at age fifty-one, Mary Bell became a grandmother. Her and her family’s whereabouts are unknown.14 The bad seed trope would resurface nearly forty years after Rhoda Penmark’s first appearance, this time in the form of her male counterpart, Henry Evans, from the 1993 film, The Good Son. Played by a young Macaulay Culkin, Henry exhibits similar psychopathic and homicidal tendencies, leading to a fatal standoff with his cousin, Mark Evans, played by a young Elijah Wood. The Bad Seeds, incidentally, released their sixth album, The Good Son, three years prior to the film, with its title track informed by the story of the biblical Cain and Abel. As with ballads, film titles, book titles, song titles, and album titles circulate freely, adapting to the author’s ends. “Artists of all kinds borrow from other artists, that’s part of how it works,” Straub wrote in November 1996, “and if Nick Cave reads a lot of fiction, as he evidently does, some of the fiction that affects him most is likely, sooner or later, to pop up in his work.”15 Cave and Straub later exchanged messages, both personally and publicly sharing admiration for each other’s work. “He sent me a signed CD!” Straub gushed in a 2018 tweet. “Nick Cave is a really dandy guy.”16

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7 The Kindness of Strangers

Of all the tragic characters throughout Murder Ballads, none are as sad and pitiable as poor Mary Bellows. Raised in poverty in Arkansas, Mary dreamed of seeing the ocean, and one day she packed her battered old suitcase and hit the road. She traveled east through Tennessee, presumably taking the most direct route on Route 40 through Nashville, Knoxville, and then into North Carolina, where she’d drive through the green mountains and valleys of the Nantahala National Forest. She’d then pass Greensboro, Durham, and Raleigh, and if she stayed on the 40, rather than switch onto the 64—and that seems unlikely, as that route would’ve taken her straight into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, and it’s doubtful Mary would be interested in that— her journey would end near Wilmington, North Carolina, on the Atlantic coast, a distance of over nine-hundred miles. We don’t know whether she drove or hitchhiked, but somewhere along her trip, she’d met a man calling himself Richard Slade, who accompanied her to her final destination.

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Mary is overcome with emotion when she finally looks out at the ocean—the vastness of it, the breaking waves, the surf rolling onto the beach, the sand between her toes. It’s more beautiful than she’d imagined. That night, Mary checks into a motel in town. Slade carries her suitcase into the motel, but Mary stops him at the door to her room. “I’m a good girl,” she says, explaining why she can’t permit him in. Slade tips his hat, winks, and exits without a word. Sitting on her bed, with the sea breeze whistling mournfully through her window, Mary begins to think of the home she’d left. Though she’s achieved her dream of seeing the ocean, she is alone. Thinking of her family back home in Arkansas, she puts her face in her hands and cries. She longs for company, someone to talk to, but she knows only one person here. Mary stands and unlocks the door. The next morning she’s found handcuffed to her motel bed, gagged, with a bullet in her head. When Nick Cave wrote “The Kindness of Strangers,” he described it as “simply an exercise in cruelty—sitting down and writing a character and making her so naïve and virtuous, and then wiping her out. I can’t define this, but there is a certain satisfaction in doing that.”1 The death of a virginal and innocent woman is a familiar trope, not only in murder ballads but in all Western art and culture, as discussed in Chapter 5, but Cave hadn’t pursued this subject with such devotedness until Murder Ballads. The undefinable appeal of inventing a perfect, guiltless young woman, only to punish her for that same guiltlessness, 78

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is rooted in the inherent patriarchy of Western society. The “certain satisfaction” Cave feels in creating and then destroying a character like Mary Bellows or Elisa Day is the satisfaction that comes with power, with control, with playing the role of the Western, imperious, patriarchal God. “The Kindness of Strangers” shares similarities with a number of American murder ballads, inspired by stories that are just as tragic as that of poor Mary Bellows—most of all the sad, unfortunate, and true story of Ellen Smith. Ellen Smith was fifteen years old in 1889 when she set out from her parents’ farm in Yadkin County, North Carolina, for the big city of Winston-Salem, which was then a thriving and bustling tobacco town.2 She was hired by a merchant named Kenny Rose as a live-in cook. Ellen was later described as “not bad looking,” with a “rather bold continence,” and a “rather sharp nose.”3 Shortly after moving to Winston-Salem, sometime in 1890, Ellen met Peter DeGraff. DeGraff was a carouser, philanderer, and petty criminal. He also had an affinity for waving around pistols, and he’d already been arrested in 1886, at age seventeen, for carrying a concealed weapon within city limits. DeGraff was also suspected, but never convicted, of a double murder at a brothel in 1891. Many people considered Ellen and Peter DeGraff ’s relationship to be volatile, but the couple stayed together for over a year. In early 1892, Ellen gave birth to a child, who died shortly after the delivery. Soon after, DeGraff decided he wanted nothing to do with her. When Ellen continued to pursue him, DeGraff complained to friends about Ellen, telling anyone that would listen that he was going to shoot her. 79

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Why DeGraff had now elected to do away with Ellen is unclear, but it follows the premise of other murder ballads: a young man, having been at first attracted to a young and innocent woman, feels it within his rights, even his duty, to dispense with her once she has been “corrupted,” or is no longer chaste. Sometimes, such as with the “Omie Wise” ballad, the man murders his lover after discovering she is pregnant, so as to evade any responsibility or dishonor. But DeGraff, according to reports, had supported Ellen throughout her pregnancy, even suggesting she name the unborn child after himself, if it was a boy, or after herself, if it was a girl. So where did DeGraff ’s sudden animosity toward Ellen come from? Was he provoked by her continued pursuit of him, did he believe that she was a corrupted woman deserving of her fate, or was he instead so tortured by his love for her that murder was his only relief? On July 18, 1892, DeGraff wrote a letter to Ellen, asking her to meet him at the spring near the Zinzendorf Hotel, in Winston-Salem’s West End neighborhood. In a crude hand, DeGraff wrote, “Please Don’t think hard of me for i have loved you all my life and can’t love nobody but you, so please let me prove your love.”4 Whether DeGraff was sincere or if this was only a ruse to lure Ellen to an outof-the-way place in the woods is uncertain, but three days later, on Thursday, July 21, Ellen’s body was discovered in a pine thicket, on her back, her hat covering her face and her dress stained with blood. A bullet had been fired point-blank into her left side, passing through her body and severing the large blood vessel beneath her heart, causing her to bleed to death. 80

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Ellen’s body was placed into a simple pine coffin, and she was buried in a pauper’s grave. A warrant for DeGraff ’s arrest was immediately issued, as he was the most obvious suspect. DeGraff hid out in Winston-Salem for four days, before fleeing to Mount Airy, thirty-five miles north, where he worked at a sawmill outside of town, keeping his head down. But nearly a year after escaping, DeGraff snuck back into Winston-Salem, and on the evening of June 23, 1893, with his friend John Russell accompanying him, he returned to the pine thicket where Ellen had been killed. Standing in the same spot where her body was found, DeGraff looked up to the sky and cried, “Ellen Smith! Ellen Smith! Ellen Smith! If you are in heaven, stay there! If in hell, rise!” Russell later recounted how DeGraff had said he was afraid Ellen’s carnal sins had damned her soul to hell, and he’d hoped to save her soul with this invocation. DeGraff himself confessed that he’d been following a superstition he’d picked up from Winston-Salem’s elderly community. “I had always heard that, if a murderer would go to the scene of the crime, they could see their victim,” he later told a jury, implicating himself.5 When nothing happened after DeGraff ’s invocation, the two men left and went to Russell’s father’s home to stay the night. Acting on tips from residents who had seen DeGraff, Sheriff McArthur and two Winston-Salem police officers conducted house-to-house searches, and eventually made their way to the Russell home, where they found DeGraff, who surrendered quietly. The trial began on August 11. DeGraff pleaded not guilty and came up with various and contradictory stories about 81

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his relationship with Ellen and the cause of her death. The trial lasted three days. After a short deliberation, the jury found DeGraff guilty of the murder of Ellen Smith. He was sentenced to be hanged on October 21, 1893, but after his appeal was denied, the new execution date was set as February 8, 1894.6 DeGraff maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration. On the day of his execution, however, after he was led up the scaffold and the noose was placed around his neck, he looked out at the crowd of an estimated six thousand onlookers and spoke his final words to a shocked audience: The thing you call corn liquor, cards, dice and other games of chance, pistols and bad women are the things that have brought me to this place—to stand on this scaffold. White and colored, I pray you to hear my words. I have kept back for months what I am going to tell you. God told me to keep it back. Yes, I shot that woman. I was drunk at the time. I put the pistol to her breast and fired. The only words she said after I shot her were: “Lord have mercy on me.” I stand here today to receive my just reward. I again say to the people here, beware of bad women and whiskey.7 Reverend H. A. Brown gave a final blessing, a black hood was placed over DeGraff ’s head, and the noose was secured. At 12:52 p.m., Sheriff McArthur pulled the trap. Ellen Smith’s first appearance on a musical recording came in 1924, by Virginia guitarist and harmonica player Henry Whitter who, along with G. B. Grayson, was responsible for cutting some of the first versions of the murder ballads “Tom 82

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Dooley,” “Omie Wise,” and “Rose Conley.” Marketed as “Ellen Smith” in Whitter’s version, the ballad would be recorded three years later by square-dance group Dykes’ Magic City Trio as “Poor Ellen Smith,” which is the name it has typically been given ever since.8 The ballad wasn’t recorded again for two decades, when it was released as a single in 1949 by Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks, for Columbia Records. O’Day’s lyrics form the basis on which most recorded versions have since followed. The opening verse begins: Poor Ellen Smith, how was she found? Shot through the heart lying cold on the ground Ellen Smith has been portrayed by certain singers— influenced, perhaps, by DeGraff ’s admonition against “bad women and whiskey”—as deserving of her fate because of her promiscuity. The singer and banjo player Frank Proffitt, who played a pivotal role in popularizing “Tom Dooley,” added additional verses to his 1962 Folkways recording of “Poor Ellen Smith,” suggesting her unfaithfulness or licentiousness brought about her death: Poor Ellen, poor Ellen, you’ve wasted your life You could’ve made some man a very good wife Proffitt wasn’t alone in this judgment. Many early variants, often sung in the first person by the accused killer, suggest the narrator is either innocent of the murder or had been betrayed by a promiscuous woman. As with all ballads, the singer is free to choose which side of the story he or she wishes to tell. The message of a ballad—the perceived 83

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innocence or guilt of the characters—ultimately reflect the singer’s own prejudices, judgments, and morals. Proffitt recalled first hearing the ballad played as an instrumental banjo tune at his home in North Carolina: “I heard all the old folks, including my father, play it on the banjo. But I never heard the words ’til some boys from this country went to the coal mines of West Virginia in 1923 and came back a-singing it.”9 Though not recorded commercially until 1924, the ballad had begun making the rounds years earlier. Song collectors found one variant called “Poor Little Ellen” in North Carolina in 1915, and another in Kentucky in 1911, long believed to be the ballad’s earliest appearance. But author and journalist Paul Slade suggests the ballad’s origin goes back as far as 1893. Ellen had been dead only fourteen months, and DeGraff was still alive in his cell, awaiting trial. Printed in full by Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Western Sentinel newspaper, “The Song of Peter DeGraff ” was purportedly dictated by DeGraff to an inmate named Charles Pepper, who shared a cell with DeGraff at the Winston-Salem jail. Pepper’s ballad begins with the type of cautionary-tale introduction typical of English ballads: Come all you kind people my story to hear, And what happened to me in June of last year, Of poor Ellen Smith and how she was found, Shot through the heart lying cold on the ground Slade writes that Pepper and DeGraff may have conspired to write this ballad to redeem DeGraff ’s reputation and drum up public sympathy, proclaiming him as innocent of Ellen’s 84

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murder. Their effort was ultimately unsuccessful, as DeGraff was hanged five months later, but the ballad itself, widely circulated after his execution, would live on. “Beyond the odd minor rephrasing, there’s nothing in any version of ‘Ellen Smith’ which doesn’t ultimately derive from Pepper’s composition,” Slade writes. “Many of its lines made their way directly into the earliest versions of ‘Poor Ellen Smith’ too, where they remain a fixture to this day.”10 Cave wouldn’t give his ballad such an obvious title as “Poor Mary Bellows.” “The Kindness of Strangers” instead references two distinct but vaguely connected sources. The phrase itself comes of course from the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which Blanche DuBois, after losing the family home, moves in with her sister, Stella, and her sister’s husband, Stanley. It’s later revealed that Blanche may have been thrown out of town after being discovered working as a prostitute in a disreputable hotel. At the close of the play, after facing numerous traumas, compounded by a sexual assault by Stanley, Blanche loses her grip on reality and has to be admitted to a mental institution. “Whoever you are,” she tells the doctor who comes to take her away, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” “Stranger than Kindness” is the fourth song on the Bad Seeds’ 1986 album, Your Funeral . . . My Trial. With lyrics written by Cave’s former lover and songwriting collaborator Anita Lane, “Stranger than Kindness” is a cryptic tale of dispassionate sex in a hotel room. To reinforce the connection between “Stranger than Kindness” and “The 85

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Kindness of Strangers,” Lane returns to make an appearance on “The Kindness of Strangers,” not as the songwriter, but as the voice of Mary Bellows herself, crying alone in her hotel room before opening the door to Richard Slade. As we’ve seen earlier, Mary Bellows’s most likely destination in her journey to reach the ocean was Wilmington, North Carolina. To get to Wilmington by way of Route 40, Mary would have passed through North Carolina’s Wilkes County, Randolph County, and Winston-Salem. Wilkes County is where Laura Foster was murdered by Tom Dula in 1866, while Naomi Wise was murdered by John Lewis in Randolph County in 1808. Ellen Smith was murdered by Peter DeGraff in WinstonSalem in 1892. These three murders would inspire the quintessential murder ballads “Tom Dooley,” “Omie Wise,” and “Poor Ellen Smith,” respectively. By traveling this route through North Carolina, Mary Bellows was unknowingly following the course of her predecessors, and thus sealing her fate.

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8 Crow Jane

It’s as sultry and smoky as an afterhours jazz club. With Martyn P. Casey’s descending bass line and accented ride cymbals from Jim Sclavunos, its melody is conspicuously evocative of the song “The Best Is Yet to Come,” popularized by Frank Sinatra with Count Basie’s orchestra. You halfexpect Nick Cave to start crooning, “Out of the tree of life, I just picked me a plum.” But instead he opens by repeating two words, as if beckoning some ancient poltergeist: “Crooooww Jaaane.” Cave had originally written the lyrics to “Crow Jane” for the Bad Seeds’ 1985 album The Firstborn Is Dead, but the band had been unable to find an agreeable melody for it. The lyrics were printed in Cave’s 1988 book of collected writings, King Ink, but the song remained unrecorded. Band member Mick Harvey recalls early efforts as being “musically a bit awful.” Cave’s lyrics tell the story of a woman called Crow Jane, apparently a prostitute, who lives alone in a small clapboard shack by a river. After the mining company closes one

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of their mines, twenty newly out-of-work miners travel across the river, enter Jane’s shack, drink her whiskey, and take turns raping her. The men then return to a town called New Haven.* Crow Jane visits a gun shop, purchases three handguns, takes a coal trolley to New Haven, and murders the twenty miners who’d raped her. She then returns to her shack, laughing all the way home. While the Bad Seeds had abandoned their initial attempts at the song, Cave found another role for Crow Jane in the meantime, as the abusive, alcoholic matriarch of his 1989 debut novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. Set in the 1940s and 1950s, in the fictional Southern setting of Ukulore Valley, And the Ass Saw the Angel is the story of a mute boy named Euchrid Eucrow and his disturbed parents, living as pariahs among a town of religious fanatics calling themselves Ukulites. Introducing Crow Jane early in the book, she is described as “sitting on the front porch day after day . . . passing the long hours slugging liberally from an unlabelled bottle containing one of her home-brewed liquors, which she made and bottled out behind the junk-pile under the old disused water tower.”1 Born Jane Crowley, and living in a “little clap and tar shack,” the book’s narrator relates how Jane earned her nickname: “The cane-men had given her the cognomen ‘Crow Jane,’ taken from a song that old Noah, the coloured

Though New Haven is a real town in Connecticut, incorporated in 1784, it is known as being home to Yale University rather than as a mining town. *

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barber, would sing in his low rich voice as he clipped and shaved and swept in his little shop on Maine.”2 Though the people, town, and events are fictional, the song that Noah hummed as he trimmed the Ukulites’ hair is real. But this “Crow Jane” bears little resemblance to the initially scrapped Bad Seeds song that shares its name. This “Crow Jane,” moreover, would’ve been familiar not only to Noah, the Ukulites, and the cane-men, but to dozens of blues singers throughout the American South. When Noah sang to his patrons in his barbershop on Maine in the 1940s, “Crow Jane” had been known to black audiences for years. The first recording of a song called “Crow Jane” was made by guitar player Julius Daniels in 1927, for the Victor record label.3 Born in 1901 in South Carolina, Daniels played a pivotal role in helping shape the Piedmont blues style, so named for its origins in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina and Virginia, distinguished by syncopated, fingerpicking guitar playing, meant to emulate ragtime piano. A variant of the song had been recorded a year earlier, as “Pistol Blues,” by Bo Weavil Jackson, for the Paramount label. Virginia bluesman Carl Martin recorded “Crow Jane Blues” for Bluebird in 1933, and other variants of the song were recorded by Josh White, as “Blood Red River,” and Blind Boy Fuller in 1937, as “Bye Bye Baby Blues.” The next recording of “Crow Jane Blues” came ten years later, by blind harmonica player Sonny Terry. Though it was once common practice to assign songwriting credits to whichever singer’s name was featured on the label, there is no single author to this song. As we’ve seen earlier, with most blues and folk songs and ballads, lyrics 89

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were routinely swapped, shuffled, and often given new titles. So while “Crow Jane” or its counterparts have been credited to numerous singers, no artist can claim sole authorship. There is, however, one blues musician who is perhaps most associated with “Crow Jane,” and whose musicianship, of all the prewar blues singers, remains one of the most distinctive and haunting—an African American musician whom guitar player John Fahey calls the “strangest, most complex and bizarre of all blues artists.”4 Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James was born on June 9, 1902, near Bentonia, Mississippi. He grew up working construction and on levee-building crews, and at an early age learned guitar and piano. From a blues musician named Henry Stuckey, he learned to play guitar in open E-minor tuning, which gave his songs a particularly mournful sound. In addition to being proficient at both guitar and piano, James sang all his songs in falsetto, further distinguishing him from his contemporaries.5 Like “Stagger” Lee Shelton before him, James worked a succession of jobs both legitimate and illicit, including sharecropper, logger, bootlegger, preacher, and pimp. Though he continued to play music for himself, he wasn’t interested in recording or becoming a professional musician. But in February 1931, when H.C. Speir hosted an open audition for musicians at his record store in Jackson, Mississippi, James decided to try out, after some considerable urging from his fellow musicians. Business owner, record dealer, and talent scout, Speir had been responsible for launching the careers of numerous Mississippi bluesmen of the 1920s and early 1930s, including 90

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Son House, Charlie Patton, and the Mississippi Sheiks. James brought his guitar to Speir’s store on Farish Street, had a seat, and began playing his song “Devil Got My Woman,” a painfully slow and somber composition, unlike anything else anyone was playing at that time. After only two verses, Speir stopped James, handed him a contract, and sent him to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record with Paramount Records.6 James cut eighteen sides for Paramount, many of which have since become classics of the prewar blues era, including “Devil Got My Woman,” “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” “Cypress Grove Blues,” and “I’m So Glad,” which was later covered by British rock group Cream. But the recording industry was devastated by the Great Depression, Paramount went out of business, and James wasn’t fully compensated for his work. He became an ordained minister, gave up blues music, and drifted throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas, taking the most menial of labor where he could find it. He wouldn’t record again for thirty years. In the meantime, James’s enigma grew among record collectors. Young, mostly white blues aficionados traveled the South seeking rare 78 rpm records and pursuing the performers who’d recorded them. James was one of the most elusive. In 1964, three college students from California, led by guitar player John Fahey, finally found James in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi, where he was being treated for cancer.7 Taciturn, aloof, and suspicious of this new breed of white folkies, James was eventually persuaded to return to performing and recording. His first public appearance came that July, at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. To the young 91

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and reverential audience, James’s appearance at the festival was like that of a dead man resurrected. That same year, James would return to recording, for the first time since recording his ill-fated sides for Paramount in 1931. After signing a contract with Fahey’s Takoma Records, James entered a studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, to record his long-awaited comeback album, She Lyin’. James dusted off some of his early songs, like “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” and “Devil Got My Woman,” and he’d also added a few new numbers to his repertoire, including “Crow Jane.” James plays “Crow Jane” on guitar in Piedmont fashion, with lively, ragtime-influenced fingerpicking, and even after thirty years of dormancy, he is still in command of his falsetto. Like his guitar playing, James’s voice is dynamic, pleasing, and indeed playful, even as he issues his quite ominous threat to Crow Jane: Don’t you hold your head high Someday, baby, you know you got to die James then declares his intention to buy a pistol and shoot Crow Jane, “just to see her fall.” But who is this Crow Jane? Where does she come from? And what inspired her strange nickname? In The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville, authors Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff write that the name was a variation of the minstrel stereotype of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jim Crow, and was performed for a black audience by black actors wearing blackface, which was not an uncommon practice at the time. According to the authors, Crow Jane was “a popular 92

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vehicle for female impersonation by blackface comedians on the African American stage,” and her character was portrayed as “raggedy and ugly, spiteful and conniving, yet not without some strange allure.”8 This is the view taken by blues singer Ida Cox, who recorded “Crow Jane Woman” for Paramount in 1928. In Cox’s telling, Crow Jane is a manipulative, man-stealing woman, a sort of predecessor to Dolly Parton’s Jolene: They say a Crow Jane is evil, I found out that’s true I don’t know what she’s got, but she sure can take your man from you We’ve seen that “Crow Jane” was in wide use, particularly in the African American community in the early twentieth century, but this still doesn’t explain where the name Jane originates from. For that, we’ll need to go back much further, to fifteenth-century England. In 1476, Elizabeth Shore (née Lambert) became one of King Edward IV’s mistresses. She was beautiful, highly educated, and came to wield great influence over the court. After the king’s death in 1483, Shore took other noblemen as lovers, and continued to be a persuasive voice, forging powerful alliances between prominent families.9 Threatened by her influence and accusing her of conspiring in a royal power struggle, Richard III accused Shore of witchcraft, but instead charged her with harlotry, sentencing her to public penance. Dressed in only a simple petticoat, Shore was condemned to walk barefoot through the streets of London, drawing attention to her alleged crime. Intended to humiliate her, the crowds who witnessed this 93

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forced walk of shame were instead impressed with the poise with which she composed herself. Author and statesman Thomas More commented how, though Shore was paraded through the streets in her undergarments, “yet went she so fair & lovely.”10 After her death at age eighty-two, around 1527, Shore was celebrated as a character in the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Heywood, and Nicholas Rowe, among other poets and playwrights. Heywood may have been the first to change her name from Elizabeth to Jane, in his seventeenth-century play Edward IV, which inspired the English broadside ballad, The Woeful Lamentation of Jane Shore. It’s uncertain why she’d been conferred this new first name, but historians believe it may have been only to differentiate her from King Edward IV’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville.11 Whatever the reason, over time “Jane Shore” came to be associated with especially attractive and irresistible prostitutes. By the early twentieth century, when Jane Shore had merged with Jim Crow, she regrettably lost her former grandeur, and devolved into a minstrel act. Describing the audience’s reaction during a 1911 vaudeville show at the Amuse Theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi, one reporter described how a male member of the Pugh and Pugh minstrel troupe “takes them out of their seats when he does that ‘Crow Jane Walk.’”12 But she drew the most, and often most unflattering, attention from blues singers. Peetie Wheatstraw complained of being ruined by “no-good Janes,” Blind Willie McTell

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confessed how, “them Bell Street Crow Janes have done got rough with me,” and Blind Blake sang, “I got a yellow gal and a brown named Mame / But the best I’ve ever had was the old Crow Jane.” A 1928 song by Foster and Harris, “Crow Jane Alley,” cautioning of Jane’s cunning and ruthlessness, issues a particularly effective warning: Yellow woman get mad, partner, she’ll hang her head and pout Crow Jane gets mad, boy, somebody’s got to go out For over half a millennium, Jane had been the object of admiration, envy, scorn, and humiliation. She began life as a favored concubine in the court of Edward IV, then was paraded barefoot through the streets of London. She was dramatized by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More. When she came to America, her station was lowered to that of a minstrel act, before becoming a vindictive prostitute. In Skip James’s archetypical lyrics, the narrator warns Jane not to hold her head high, before killing her anyway. Jane’s long and inglorious story had seemingly come to a close, before Nick Cave decided to give her literally the last laugh, “laughing all the way back from the new town,” its population now reduced by half. Mick Harvey recalls walking into the recording studio as the band was working out an instrumental jam during the Murder Ballads sessions. Casey was playing a slow and jazzy bass line while Sclavunos sat behind the drums. Harvey thought that it sounded “really nice.” But then he looked

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down at some sheets of paper, discovered what song they were working on, and had flashbacks to all the calamitous recording attempts ten years prior. He was horrified to learn what—and who—was being resurrected. “It was those lyrics,” Harvey says. “And I was like, ‘Oh god, it’s Crow Jane.’”

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9 O’Malley’s Bar

Recorded in January 1993, at Atlantis  Sound in South Melbourne, Australia, the longest and most graphic song on Murder Ballads was also the first to be recorded for the album. The Bad Seeds were in the recording studio, working on Let Love In demo sessions while at the same time mixing tracks for the band’s 1993 live album, Live Seeds, when Nick Cave sat down at the piano and began playing something new. Though unfamiliar to the band, this song had been on Cave’s mind for some time. As he related later, inspiration had first come during a stopover on a long European tour: I woke up in the morning, next to a swimming pool in some godawful German town. . . . I was in my suit and I had a hangover that you would not believe, and I was lying there, and there was this German party going on. It was very early in the morning, but there was this bunch of . . . holidaymakers, doing whatever those people do, but doing it very noisily. And I didn’t really have the energy to be able get off this banana lounge and find the room. And I started to write this song there, and basically give these

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German holidaymakers names and describe them and execute them on the page. And this became like a diary, notebook, that I would have, that I would keep adding to whenever anyone irritated me on my travels.1 By the time Cave brought his notebook into Atlantis Sound, he had pages and pages of verses, filled with blood and retribution, but no clear idea of how the music would sound. When he sat down at the piano, the only other band members in the room were Thomas Wydler and Mick Harvey. “He started playing this song on the piano, which had about five thousand verses, and we just started playing along with him,” Harvey said. “We just set up some kind of rhythm, some groove going with it, and after about a half an hour of playing it, with him singing relentlessly, we decided to do a take of it from the beginning, once it settled into some form.”2 Aside from its extended length, “O’Malley’s Bar” stands apart from most other songs on Murder Ballads due to its musical arrangement—or rather, its lack thereof. There is no chorus and no refrain. It is punctuated only by minor chord piano notes, sharp snare cracks, and Cave’s hums and moans. It locks into a rhythm and continues unabated for over fourteen minutes. Its closest counterpart on the album is “Song of Joy,” which was also written before the concept of Murder Ballads was conceived. These two songs comprise what Roland Boer, author of Nick Cave: A Study of Love, Death, and Apocalypse, calls the “sinister song.” The sinister song, Boer explains, is noted for “the mad voice,” marked above all by elaborate articulation, lascivious attention to the word’s own detail, the soft sound of 98

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opening lips, a quiver of excitement, as well as moments of intense crescendo and even gravelly breathing . . . the sinister song is not merely oppressive and macabre, for what clinches the sinister touch is an upbeat, dance-like rhythm, all delivered in a bright key that ensures a grim humour is never far away.3 The narrator of “O’Malley’s Bar” orders a drink from the proprietor, then makes the sign of the cross—a traditional Catholic gesture made at the beginning and end of prayer, upon entering or leaving church, and at the start of each Mass. He then states how his hand “decided that the time was nigh,” as though his hand had a will of its own. Because these lyrics were composed near the same time as the songs from Let Love In, we can draw a connection between the protagonist of “O’Malley’s Bar” and the “tall, handsome man” of “Red Right Hand.” His first victims are O’Malley, his wife, and his daughter, Siobhan. He announces to the other bar patrons that he bears no personal grudge against any of them, then continues his rampage, killing his victims dispassionately, all the while describing each murder in analytic detail. He is intimately familiar with each of his victims, having lived quietly and unnoticed among them for thirty years. Periodically during his spree, he is reminded of Catholic saints and martyrs, but he appears to be preoccupied less with the loving and forgiving God of the New Testament than with the wrathful God of the Old Testament, who mercilessly delivers judgment and vengeance—a conviction which appealed to Cave: “When I bought my first copy of the Bible, the King James version,

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it was to the Old Testament that I was drawn,” Cave writes, “with its maniacal, punitive God, that dealt out to His longsuffering humanity punishments that had me drop-jawed in disbelief at the very depth of their vengefulness.”4 Early in the massacre, the narrator of “O’Malley’s Bar” introduces himself to his audience by leaping on top of the bar and shouting down his name. Does he shout his name because he demands to be seen? To be respected? To be acknowledged, after being ignored by his neighbors for thirty years? We don’t get to hear his name, so we can only wonder what name he has given for himself. Is he an avenging angel of God (indeed, his “red right hand”) or is he (or does he believe himself to be) the Adversary? Like the protagonist of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” the similarly anonymous of “O’Malley’s Bar” presents himself as a handsome, worldly, and refined gentleman. In “Sympathy for the Devil,” the “man of wealth and taste” ultimately tells his audience to call him Lucifer. Would we be correct in assuming the same about Cave’s tall and handsome man? When he stands on the bar and shouts his name, Jerry Bellows hugs his bar stool, closes his eyes, shrugs, and laughs. Is there a more appropriate response to someone who, in the middle of a murderous rampage, announces to the room he is Lucifer? In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes how Lucifer had, like Adam and Eve and their descendants, been given free will by God, which made possible his rebellion in heaven—an interpretation that follows the Bible’s words on human and angelic free will. Yet the narrator claims twice to have no free will, even refuting one of his victim’s accusations of being “an 100

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evil man,” by wondering how someone with no free will can be “morally culpable.” “I have no free will,” he cries, by means of an explanation for his actions, which is less an explanation than a justification, such as earlier when he states how his hand, as if acting independently, had decided that the time was imminent. Lucifer and the other rebel angels had free will, however, so only a creature deprived of it, incapable of acting independently of God, would not be “morally culpable” for his actions. By painting himself as some dronelike, subjugated angel of death, the narrator seeks to both exalt and exonerate himself, playacting in order to place the blame elsewhere. He seems to want us and his victims to believe he has no say in the matter, yet he gloats over each killing. He wants us to believe he is some kind of avenging angel, yet the only thing he is vindicating is his own ego. He can be either some kind of order-following lackey or he can be a righteous dispenser of judgment and retribution, but he can’t have it both ways. During the course of his rampage, the narrator also periodically likens himself to a raven. He speaks of the feathers on his “blazing wings” and the “raven hair” on his head as he “flew about the murder.” He pauses to admire his hair styled like a raven’s wing. Since ancient history, ravens have been associated with ill omens and death, from the Morrígan warrior goddess of Celtic mythology, to Edgar Allen Poe’s “ungainly fowl.” Tibetan mythology imagined ravens as emissaries for the Supreme Being,5 while in medieval Scotland, writes George Muirhead in The Birds of Berwickshire, the bird was considered “of such evil repute, 101

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that it was even supposed that the devil himself sometimes appeared in the shape of a Corbie.”6 The early 1990s, when Cave was carrying around his notebook and composing the lyrics that would become “O’Malley’s Bar,” was a particularly violent time in American popular culture. Music was becoming louder and more aggressive, from the gangsta rap of Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and 2Pac, to the heavy metal of Pantera, Helmet, and Cannibal Corpse. The year 1994 alone brought Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. But few characters were as controversial, or shared as much in common with the protagonist of “O’Malley’s Bar,” as the tall, thin, and handsome Patrick Bateman, from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho. Bateman is a young, materialistic, and narcissistic Wall Street investment banker—a man of great wealth and impeccable taste. He rhapsodizes, in long streams of consciousness, about business, fashion, women, grooming and etiquette, and pop music. He is also a highly methodical serial killer, who brutalizes his victims in protracted and increasingly sadistic ways. In one scene, Bateman describes an encounter with a random man on the street: I push him back, hard, with a bloodied glove and start randomly stabbing him in the face and head, finally slashing his throat open in two brief chopping motions; an arc of red-brown blood splatters the white BMW 320i parked at the curb, setting off its car alarm, four fountainlike bursts coming from below his chin. The spraylike sound of the blood.

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After killing the man (and his dog), Bateman runs away and enters into a supermarket, where he purchases a box of oat bran cereal using a coupon, then mocks the clerk for being too “dumb” and “slow” to notice the coupon had expired. Stuffing the dry cereal into his mouth, Bateman exits the store, “and then I’ve opened my umbrella and I’m running down Broadway, then up Broadway, then down again, screaming like a banshee, my coat open, flying out behind me like some kind of cape.”7 Originally envisioned by Ellis as a satirical indictment of yuppie culture, empty consumerism, and capitalist greed, American Psycho brought immediate controversy. Ellis’s publisher Simon & Schuster refused to publish the book, citing its graphic violence against women. It was picked up by Vintage Books, but numerous countries, including Germany and Australia, considered the book harmful to minors; it was prohibited from being sold to anyone under eighteen years of age, and it was required to be shrink-wrapped. In a review for the Guardian, critic Joan Smith, paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, denounced the book as “nasty, brutish and long”—a description that could easily apply to “O’Malley’s Bar.”8 But the book, published the same year The Silence of the Lambs dominated American movie theaters, was an immediate bestseller, going on to sell over a million copies. It was adapted into a 2000 film starring Christian Bale, Jared Leto, and Reese Witherspoon, and in December 2013 the musical adaptation premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London. Throughout American Psycho, Bateman exhibits obvious sociopathic behavior—from his obsessive-compulsiveness, 103

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to the cold impassivity of his murders—but as the book progresses he shows himself to be an unreliable narrator, and we are ultimately left to question the veracity of his story. Is Bateman the homicidal maniac he purports himself to be, or was it all in his imagination? Is American Psycho an indictment of a materialist society, or the confession of an antisocial loner, who resorts to desperate and fatal measures in his desire to be seen and respected? When “O’Malley’s Bar” at last reaches its conclusion, we are left with more unanswered questions than answers. The ending is ominous and feels inconclusive. The protagonist considers using his final bullet on himself, but decides to surrender, with a lack of ceremony and a great show of submissiveness, again contradicting his earlier claim to possess no free will. He is placed into a police cruiser, and as he’s driven away, staring out the car window at the “terrible scene,” he inexplicably begins counting on his fingers. If we add up the victims in “O’Malley’s Bar,” we come to twelve bodies. This number is significant. Twelve months in a lunar year. Twelve hours on the clock. Twelve step programs. Twelve members of a jury. In the book of Genesis, the twelve sons of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob give rise to the Twelve Tribes of Israel, which would inspire the Gospel narrative of Jesus and his twelve Apostles. The twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation begins with a woman—representing either the Virgin Mary or the Catholic Church—wearing a crown of twelve stars, for each of the Twelve Tribes. This chapter goes on to recount the battle between the Archangel Michael and Lucifer, resulting in Lucifer and his rebellious angels being expelled from 104

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heaven, which would in turn provide the inspiration for Milton’s Paradise Lost. So who, really, is the narrator of “O’Malley’s Bar”? Is he Lucifer, banished from heaven and taking out his fury on twelve innocent strangers, as though to enact revenge on God and His Son? Or is he a destroying angel sent by God, a Celtic warrior goddess, or a “Ghastly grim and ancient Raven,” to quote Poe? Or is he a Bateman-like psychopath, who may or may not have committed the crimes he brags about? Nick Groom makes the observation that, while “there are contextual parallels between the protagonist of ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ and Patrick Bateman,” they are materially different characters. The character in “O’Malley’s Bar,” despite his many delusions, does (probably) perpetrate mass murder. “Bateman, on the other hand (apart from being from a very different social class) is a deluded fantasist,” Groom says, “and it is unclear whether he has committed any of the atrocities in which he revels.” Bateman, then, could be considered less analogous to the narrator of “O’Malley’s Bar” and more to Cave himself—each of them indulging in fantasies of murder and retribution. Speaking about this song in an interview, however, Cave attempted to distance himself from his protagonist: “I loathe this character,” Cave confessed. “He imagines himself to be this winged nemesis, an angel of death. In his own mind he’s just trying to do what he thinks is right, but in fact he is a dribbling fool with a gun, a moral coward who doesn’t have the imagination to do anything better with his life.”9 This contradicts his statements about “Stagger Lee” and “The Kindness of Strangers,” in which Cave boasts 105

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about his protagonists’ depravity. Why the reversal here? Perhaps he saw too much of himself in his protagonist’s selfrighteousness and narcissism, and in the way Cave, in his songs, also indulges in cavalier violence, dispatching all his hapless victims from on high. Perhaps Cave was worried his listeners would too easily associate him with this “dribbling fool.” Whoever this character is and wherever he came from, his origin is ultimately with a hungover Cave, sitting poolside with members of the Bad Seeds and a raucous mob of German tourists. In April 1996, the year of Murder Ballads’ release, Cave recounted this fateful moment: I had a banana daiquiri in one hand and my notes in the other. Everyone was drunk. Everyone was laughing and shouted line after line to each other. I remember I thought about writing a verse where someone was drinking banana daiquiri, and I shouted out over the pool, “Can someone come up with something which rhymes with daiquiri?” I think I was going to call a character Thackery and shoot him through his banana daiquiri. . . . But in the end it just seemed to be the wrong kind of bar to drink banana daiquiris in, so it didn’t happen.10

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10 Death Is Not the End

No one expected this. Though he’d frequently referenced the Bible, using its stories and imagery as inspiration for his song lyrics, his fans never anticipated he’d one day take Christianity seriously. It was especially confusing, considering his years-long status as a countercultural icon. So when Bob Dylan declared himself a born-again Christian in 1978, it caused confusion and disbelief among fans, peers, and critics alike.1 After Dylan’s embrace of evangelical Christianity, he refused to perform his older songs, and his new material reflected his newfound faith. Onstage, he would launch into lengthy, uncharacteristic, and often rambling sermons. “You know we’re living in the end times,” he told one audience in 1979. “The scriptures say, ‘In the last days, perilous times shall be at hand. Men shall become lovers of their own selves. Blasphemous, heavy and high-minded . . . I told you ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’  and they did. I said the answer was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and it was. I’m telling you now Jesus is coming back, and he is! And there is

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no other way of salvation. . . . Jesus is coming back to set up his kingdom in Jerusalem for a thousand years.”2 Dylan’s apocalyptic theology was particularly informed by evangelical author Hal Lindsey, whose 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth prophesied imminent worldwide mayhem, auguring the second coming of Christ. “As the battle of Armageddon reaches its awful climax,” Lindsey writes, “and it appears that all life will be destroyed on earth—in this very moment Jesus Christ will return and save man from self-extinction.”3 Dylan’s first album from his so-called born-again phase, 1979’s Slow Train Coming, contained numerous eschatological symbols, drawn largely from the book of Revelation. “The iron hand, it ain’t no match for the iron rod / The strongest wall will crumble and fall to a mighty God,” Dylan sings on “When He Returns,” citing Rev. 19:15: “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.” On “Precious Angel,” Dylan sings, “Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die?” citing Rev. 9:6: “And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.” Dylan’s next album, 1980’s Saved, was less apocalyptic, but still dogmatic and preachy. The following year, with Shot of Love, he was already beginning to return to more secular songwriting, and he’d begun to tamp down on the proselytizing. He wouldn’t put out a new album for two 108

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years, and in 1983, with the release of Infidels, he’d already turned away from evangelical Christianity. Many of his lyrics, however, continued to contain infrequent—though much more cryptic—religious symbolism. “Jokerman” tells of an enigmatic, Mr. Tambourine Manlike character, a “manipulator of crowds,” and a “dream twister.” “I and I”—its title referencing the Rastafarian concept of humanity’s oneness with God—fuses Old and New Testament imagery to describe a romantic tryst. In “Man of Peace,” Satan possesses a “sweet gift of gab,” and a “harmonious tongue,” evoking Mick Jagger’s “man of wealth and taste.” Another song Dylan wrote during this time, recorded by the studio musicians in one take, is a somewhat befuddling and languid ballad titled “Death Is Not the End.” Though it was initially intended for Infidels, Dylan decided not to include “Death Is Not the End” on the album. The song was shelved, passed around by fans on bootleg records, until 1988, when Dylan decided to include it on the otherwise forgettable Down in the Groove.* “Death Is Not the End” is as cryptic as “Jokerman,” “I and I,” or, likewise, much of his material from the 1960s. While a cursory reading of the lyric could be interpreted as a holdover of Dylan’s Christian period—hopeful belief in the afterlife, where God “will wipe every tear from their eyes”—a deeper appraisal suggests something else, something more ambiguous.

Folk-rock band the Waterboys recorded a live version of the song in 1986 but, following Dylan’s example, didn’t release it until years later, in 1998. *

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The belief in an afterlife is at the center of Christian faith. Saint Peter and the pearly gates, the devil and his pitchfork— these are uniquely Christian innovations. In Judaism, the afterlife is mentioned in the Tanakh as a place called Sheol, a Hebrew word describing a dark place where all souls assemble, righteous and wicked alike. Not until his dalliance with evangelical Christianity had Dylan, born and raised in a Jewish home, espoused any outward interest in the immortal soul. But “Death Is Not the End” stands apart from Dylan’s other songs from or directly following his Christian period, because, while he more or less endorses the idea of life after death, he never once mentions God. The only minor suggestion of deliverance is found in the bridge, when Dylan sings of a tree of life growing where the spirit never dies. “Death Is Not the End” shares its title with an obscure recording by a singer named Ethel Profit, accompanied by guitar player Newman Yearby. Little is known about Miss Profit aside from the few 45s she recorded in the 1970s. Originally issued on the Brother record label sometime in the early 1970s, “Death Is Not the End” was reissued in 2012 by Mississippi Records. Profit and Yearby’s song is a sparse, gospel-blues number, with lyrics only slightly less vague than Dylan’s: When a man dies shall you live again You don’t have to worry, death is not the end Considering his long history of appropriating folk and blues songs without crediting the original source, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Dylan used Profit’s song at least as a template for his own. Dylan’s song, however, offers a more apocalyptic 110

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vision, especially its final verse, in what could be seen as a remnant of his former obsession with the book of Revelation and The Late Great Planet Earth: When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men Just remember that death is not the end The ambiguousness of Dylan’s lyrics in many ways reflects Nick Cave’s own evolving relationship to faith, particularly to his belief, or lack of belief, in an afterlife: “I have a general feeling that there’s some kind of divinity in the world, something I really can’t put my finger on,” Cave said, “but something that prevents me from saying that you just die and it’s all over and prevents me from saying that uncategorically there’s no such thing as any higher level of spirituality or whatever.” “I feel there is something like that, but at the same time, I don’t believe in heaven and hell,” he continued. “I certainly hope that I’m right in that respect.”4 Though Cave’s thoughts on morality and eternal salvation are indeterminate and ever evolving, his art has been less ambiguous. In his music, especially on Murder Ballads, good is good and evil is evil and often these forces come together violently. The monsters in Cave’s songs might reflect some part of his subconscious but, in his personal and professional life, he—like most of us—has chosen to abide by certain morals and principles, whether or not he believes in heaven and hell or “some kind of divinity.” Nobody knows for certain what happens after we die. But regardless of our belief in heaven and hell or lack thereof, we, too, hope that we are “right in that respect.” 111

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By choosing to close Murder Ballads with Dylan’s obscure song—the only straight cover song on the record—Cave wanted to end on a lighthearted note, following all the death and mayhem that precedes it. But this song, Cave acknowledges, is anything but light: “The interesting thing is that I’ve always thought of Dylan’s song as hopelessly pessimistic. I’m sure he didn’t really mean it like that, but I’ve always read it like: life is shit now, but it doesn’t end when we’re dead, we continue to suffer even beyond death. In that way it is really hopeless.”5 Whether because or regardless of its suggested hopelessness and pessimism, Cave and the Bad Seeds chose to give the song a fun and cheerful feel, deliberately satirizing the all-star singalongs that were popular in the 1980s, such as 1985’s Live Aid concert and the “We Are the World” benefit song, also from 1985, featuring Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and, notably, Bob Dylan, among others. Mick Harvey explains how Murder Ballads, in its early stages, had initially been conceived as a type of video album, with a music video accompanying each song, and that “Death Is Not the End” was “designed as a kind of comedy end.” Harvey had suggested ending with a verse from drummer Thomas Wydler, with a close-up shot of Wydler lip-syncing his lines while playing the drums, but even when the idea of a video album was ultimately scrapped, the song remained. “It ended up staying on the album for some reason, which is really funny,” Harvey says. “There’s no explanation what it’s doing there. But that’s why it’s there, because it was meant to 112

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be almost like, at the credits, with the credits rolling. It was meant to be at the end as a joke, something lighthearted, or some light relief at the end of everything.” Vocals on the song were assigned to Cave, Wydler, guitar player Blixa Bargeld, Shane MacGowan (songwriter and vocalist for the Pogues), Cave’s former lover and songwriting partner Anita Lane, Kylie Minogue, and P.J. Harvey. Henry Rollins, of hardcore punk bands Black Flag and the Rollins Band, was also slated to sing a verse for the music video. “I wanted Kylie, Henry, Shane, Blixa, Anita, Polly and me to perform this song together in the video,” Cave said. “But we weren’t able to arrange it.”6 “Death Is Not the End” serves as a kind of curtain call, where all the characters and actors come on stage to take a bow, to remind the audience that all is well, that it had all been a performance, an act, a work of fiction. None of the singers have actually died. We are all here together, sharing a nervous laugh: Look what we got away with. Placed at the end of Murder Ballads, “Death Is Not the End” served as “just kind of a jokey little punctuation mark to the whole thing,” Cave explained. “There’s tongue-incheek to that song, even though I think it’s quite a beautiful rendition.”7 This wasn’t the first Bob Dylan song covered by the Bad Seeds. On their 1985 album, The Firstborn Is Dead, the band included a rendition of “Wanted Man,” which Dylan had originally written for his 1969 country album, Nashville Skyline, but had instead given, with cowriting credits, to country icon Johnny Cash, who included it on his 1969 live album, At San Quentin. Because Cave had modified 113

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some of Dylan’s lyrics to “Wanted Man,” he had to ask Dylan’s permission to include the song on The Firstborn Is Dead. Waiting for Dylan’s permission delayed the release of the album, but, like a king or an Old Testament patriarch, Dylan ultimately gave Cave his blessing.8 When Cave and the Bad Seeds decided to include “Death Is Not the End” on Murder Ballads, however, they kept the lyrics intact, thus circumventing the need to wait for Dylan’s permission. Dylan and Cave met for the first and only time in 1998, only a couple of years after Murder Ballads, during a rainy day at the Glastonbury Festival. As Cave recollected years later in his 2015 book The Sick Bag Song, a “hooded figure” emerged from a trailer, braved the deluge, and approached a bewildered Cave: Then slowly, extending from his sleeve, A cold, white, satin hand took mine. Hey, I like what you do, he said to me. I like what you do too, I replied. I nearly died. Then his hand retracted up his sleeve, And Bob Dylan turned and took his leave, Disappearing back into the rain.9 *** The End When the Bad Seeds recorded Murder Ballads, they believed it would be a commercial flop, reviled by critics and fans. 114

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Cave confessed his initial reservations about the record, leading up to its release: I remember when we had finished working with the record and I had it on tape. I said to my mother—who I was living with at that time—“Eh, mum, I have my new record here, would you like to sit down and listen to it?” And she was enthusiastic. So I put on the tape, sat down on the couch, and after three or four songs I began to think, “What the hell kind of record is this really? It’s just grotesque and disgusting.” But my mother still was enthusiastic: “This is fantastic, oh, I love it!” So I said, “OK, you continue to listen, I’ll go and take a hot bath or something.”10 Speaking with Rolling Stone in 1996, Cave said Murder Ballads was “designed to offend, to be like one of those records like Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait, where people just go, ‘What the fuck is this load of crap?’ In fact, it didn’t work out that way.”11 Murder Ballads received near-universal praise. It reached number sixteen on Melody Maker’s “Albums of the Year” list, and number seven in the NME’s critics’ poll. Entertainment Weekly called it “the rare pop record that resonates with the weight of the ages.”12 It was the band’s biggest worldwide success to date, and over twenty years later, it still ranks among the Bad Seeds’ most beloved albums. The popularity of Murder Ballads can in some ways be attributed to its shocking and graphic content, as well as society’s endless fascination with death and violence. But the record’s success also serves as a testament to the enduring 115

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appeal of ballads and storytelling. Though the form is not as pervasive as it had been in the late modern period and into the early twentieth century, ballads continue to crop up, evolving over time, finding innovative ways to permeate and inspire popular music. “Ballad-making has definitely gone into a decline, from which it will probably never regain its former robustness,” writes Olive Woolley Burt in American Murder Ballads and Their Stories. “But I do not expect it to die entirely. As natural and human as gossip, it should live as long as murders are committed and folks can make rhyme.”13 Death, heartbreak, misdeeds, and murder have for centuries been a reoccurring theme of our greatest artistic achievements—not because we want to celebrate suffering and misery, but because we want to make sense of it, to learn from it what we can, and to turn our suffering into something beautiful. Ballads reflect our deepest fears and desires. They reveal our worst impulses as well as our greatest joys. Ballads have endured for as long as they have because they speak to us as equals, as fellow flawed human beings in this wearisome, tragic, yet magnificent existence.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Mick Harvey and Jim Sclavunos of the Bad Seeds, for taking the time to speak with me about a record they’d made over two decades ago. Their individual recollections gave this book a distinction it wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’d like to thank photographer and director Rocky Schenck, for offering me the particulars of his venerated “Where the Wild Roses Grow” and “Henry Lee” music videos; and to Nick Groom, professor of literature in English at the University of Macau, for his invaluable insights and suggestions. Every book, no matter how slim, is strengthened by a good editor, and I am grateful to Emily Mackay for her meticulousness and sharp eye. As a longtime admirer of the 33 1/3 series, I cannot begin to express what an honor it is to have this book included in such great company, and I am immensely thankful to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Amy Martin of Bloomsbury, for the opportunity and support. The first chapter of this book was written during a stay at the Sou’wester Artist Residency Program in Seaview, Washington. With a breeze from the Pacific Ocean blowing in through the windows of my private cabin, and the beach a

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short stroll away, this was a rather paradoxical way to begin a book on killing and mayhem, but it nevertheless got the ball rolling. This book was completed with support from the 2019 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress, from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my late mother, Susan Finley, who had enthusiastically championed this project well before I’d even signed the contract. She passed away before I began writing this book, but her memory encouraged me throughout.

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Notes

Introduction 1 “Nick Cave—The Murder Ballads Interview,” WithGuitars, March 2, 2011, https​:/​/ww​​w​.wit​​hguit​​ars​.c​​om​/ni​​ck​-ca​​ve​-th​​e​mur​​der​-b​​al​lad​​s​-int​​ervie​​w. 2 Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, dir. Larry Meltzer, September 13, 2008. 3 Albert B. Friedman, ed., The Penguin Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World (Originally published as The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World, Viking Press, 1956, reprinted by Penguin Books, 1978), xii. 4 Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge, eds., English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904), xi. 5 Ibid. 6 Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), xii. 7 Bad Man Ballads, Southern Journey, Vol. 9, Prestige International, 1960.

NOTES

8 Liner notes to People Take Warning: Murder Ballads and Disaster Songs, 1913–1938, Tompkins Square, 2007. 9 Olive Woolley Burt, American Murder Ballads and their Stories (Oxford University Press, 1958), 4. 10 Nick Groom, “Executioner-Style: Nick Cave and the Murder Ballad Tradition,” in The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, ed. John H. Baker (Intellect, 2013), 81–2. 11 G. Malcolm Laws Jr., Native American Balladry (American Folklore Society, 1964), 22. 12 Daniel Newman, “Murder Ballads: Nick Cave and His Approach to Killing in Song” (Musicology Australia, 2017), 39:2, 98. 13 Jim Sclavunos, Murder Ballads: Essay, 2005, republished February 10, 2019, http:​/​/dec​​aapok​​alips​​e​.blo​​gspot​​.com/​​2019/​​ 02​/es​​say​-b​​y​-jim​​-sc​la​​vunos​​.html​. 14 Michael Dwyer, “Murder, He Said,” Rolling Stone Australia, November 1995, http:​/​/www​​.bad-​​seed.​​org/~​​cave/​​inter​​views​​/ 95​-1​​1​_​ozr​​s​.htm​​l.

Chapter 1 1 “Nick Cave—The Murder Ballads Interview,” WithGuitars, March 2, 2011. 2 Ibid. 3 Sebastian Stebe, “Nick Cave—A Murder Ballads Interview Retrospective, 1996,” POP #17, April 1996, reposted at Nick Cave Fixes on May 14, 2010, https​:/​/ni​​ckcav​​efixe​​s​.wor​​dpres​​ s​.com​​/2010​​/05​/1​​4​/nic​​k​-cav​​e​-a​-m​​urder​​-ball​​ads​-i​​nterv​​ie​w​-r​​ etros​​pecti​​ve​-19​​96.

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4 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (First Avenue Editions, 2014), 65, ProQuest eBook. 5 Rachel Chang, “How the BTK Killer Got His Name,” Biography, August 27, 2019, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bio​​graph​​y​.com​​/news​​/ btk-​​kille​​r​-mea​​ning-​​denni​​s​​-rad​​er​-cl​​ues. 6 Douglas Martin, “William Heirens, the ‘Lipstick Killer,’ Dies at 83,” The New York Times, March 7, 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​ com​/2​​012​/0​​3​/07/​​us​/wi​​lliam​​-heir​​ens​-t​​he​-li​​pstic​​k​-kil​​​ler​-d​​ies​a​​t​-83.​​html.​ 7 Paul Slade, Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories that Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015), 233. 8 Ibid., 271.

Chapter 2 1 Mojo, “The Young Gun,” January 11, 1996, http:​//​ www​​.bad-​​ seed.​​org/~​​cave/​​info/​​songs​​/mb​_s​​tagge​​​rlee.​​html.​ 2 Ibid. 3 Greil Marcus, “Sly Stone: The Myth of Staggerlee,” in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music, 3rd ed. (New York: Dutton, 1990), 65. 4 Paul Slade, Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015), 2–3. 5 Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Harvard University Press, 2003), 90. 6 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 8.

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7 Ibid. 8 Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 22. 9 Ibid., 23. 10 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 6. 11 Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 37–8. 12 Ibid., 23–4. 13 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 7–8. 14 Ibid., 1. 15 http:​/​/www​​.stag​​gerle​​e​.com​​/pgs/​​histo​​​ry2​.p​​hp. 16 Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 8. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 Ibid., 60. 19 https​:/​/ww​​w​.bil​​lboar​​d​.com​​/musi​​c​/llo​​​yd​-pr​​ice. 20 Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 178. 21 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 27–8. 22 Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, dir. Larry Meltzer, September 13, 2008. 23 Ibid. 24 Mojo, “The Young Gun.” 25 Ibid. 26 Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy; Brown, 214. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 Ibid., 34. 29 Ibid., 35–6.

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Chapter 3 1 “The Rise of Consumerism,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.pbs​​.org/​​wgbh/​​ameri​​ canex​​perie​​nce​/f​​eatur​​es​/tu​​pperw​​​are​-c​​onsum​​er. 2 https​:/​/ww​​w​.bri​​tanni​​ca​.co​​m​/top​​ic​/nu​​clear​​-stra​​tegy/​​Massi​​v​e​-re​​ talia​​tion.​ 3 Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (Picador, Updated ed. 2011), 94. 4 Ibid., 85–6. 5 Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard University Press, 1996), 199. 6 Cecil James Sharp and Olive Arnold (Dame) Campbell, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 47–54. 7 Ibid., 47. 8 Simon Hattenstone, “Old Nick,” The Guardian, February 22, 2008, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/mu​​sic​/2​​008​/f​​eb​/23​​/popa​​ nd​roc​​k​.fea​​tures​.

Chapter 4 1 Norm Cohen, Folk Music: A Regional Exploration (Greenwood Press, 2005), 116–17. 2 Liner notes to Traditional and Public Domain Songs, Marisa Anderson, reissued by Mississippi Records, 2017. 3 Paul Slade, Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015), 145.

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4 Ibid., 150. 5 Ibid., 160. 6 Cecil James Sharp and Olive Arnold (Dame) Campbell, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 156. 7 Rennie Sparks, “Pretty Polly,” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, eds. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 39. 8 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 171.

Chapter 5 1 Debbie Kruger, “Nick Cave: The Songwriter Speaks,” in Nick Cave: Sinner Saint: The True Confessions, ed. Mat Snow (LaVergne: Plexus Publishing Ltd., 2015), 170, OverDrive eBook. 2 Jeff Jenkins and Ian Meldrum, Molly Meldrum presents 50 Years of Rock in Australia (Melbourne, Vic: Wilkinson Publishing Pty Ltd., 2007), 227. 3 Michael Hann, “Kylie on How Ageing, Breast Cancer and Nick Cave All Influenced Her Greatest Hits,” The Guardian, April 26, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/mu​​sic​/2​​018​/a​​pr​/26​​/ kyli​​e​-min​​ogue-​​on​-ho​​w​-age​​ing​-b​​reast​​-canc​​er​-an​​d​-nic​​k​-cav​​e​all​​​-infl​​uence​​d​-her​​-grea​​test-​​hits.​ 4 Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, dir. Larry Meltzer, September 13, 2008. 5 Ibid. 6 Edward Bunting, The Ancient Music of Ireland (Dublin, 1840), ix. 124

NOTES

7 The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2, eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 2024. 8 John Harrington, Folk-Songs of the South (Harvard University Press, 1925), 314. 9 D. K. Wilgus, “‘Rose Connoley’: An Irish Ballad,” The Journal of American Folklore (American Folklore Society 92, no. 364, April–June, 1979), 172–95. 10 Wayne Erbsen, Rural Roots of Bluegrass: Songs, Stories & History (Mel Bay Publications, 2003), 71. 11 Charles K. Wolfe, Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky (The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 104. 12 Dave Marsh, “Barbara Allen,” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, eds. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 9. 13 Christina Ruth Hastie, “‘This Murder Done’: Misogyny, Femicide, and Modernity in 19th-Century Appalachian Murder Ballads” (Master’s Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2011), 6. 14 Ingrid Fernandez, “The Corpse Bride: Ideal Beauty and Domestic Degradation in the Work of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds” (Academic Research Journals, March 2014), 30. 15 The Stud Brothers, “Solitary Confinement: Interview with Nick Cave,” Melody Maker, August 23, 1986, 30. 16 Rachael Baitch Zeleny, “Ophelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’” (New Victorian Studies 3:2, 2010), 64. 17 https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​time_​​conti​​nue​=2​​5​&v​= V​​qdX​-a​​glsXU​​&f​eat​​ure​=e​​mb​_lo​​go. 18 Ibid. 125

NOTES

Chapter 6 1 Peter Straub, The Throat (Dutton Adult, 1993, republished by Anchor Books in 2010), 4. 2 Peter Straub website, http://peterstraub​.net​/faq/. 3 Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, dir. Larry Meltzer, September 13, 2008. 4 Ibid. 5 William March, The Bad Seed (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., New York, 1954; republished by Vintage Books in 2015), 35. 6 Ibid., 70. 7 The Bad Seed, dir. Mervyn LeRoy, September 12, 1956. 8 Gitta Sereny, The Case of Mary Bell: A Portrait of a Child Who Murdered (McGraw-Hill, 1972), 115. 9 Ibid., 84. 10 Peter Vronsky, Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters (New York: Berkley Books, 2007), 41. 11 “QC Alleges Schoolgirls Murdered Two Boys ‘Solely for Pleasure,’” The Guardian, December 6, 1968, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ guard​​ian​.c​​om​/so​​ciety​​/1968​​/dec/​​06​/ch​​i​ldpr​​otect​​ion. 12 Antonia Monacelli, “Murderous Children: 11-Year-Old Serial Killer Mary Bell,” Owlcation, January 11, 2018, https​:/​/ow​​lcati​​on​.co​​m​/soc​​ial​-s​​cienc​​es​/Mu​​rdero​​us​Ch​​ildr​e​​n​-Mar​​y​-Bel​​l. 13 Alex Kotlowitz, “A Bad Seed?” The New York Times, April 18, 1999, http:​/​/mov​​ies2.​​nytim​​es​.co​​m​/boo​​ks​/99​​/04​/1​​8​/rev​​iews/​​ 99041​​8​.​18k​​otlow​​t​.htm​​l.

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14 Chris Irvine, “Child Killer Mary Bell Becomes a Grandmother at 51,” The Telegraph, January 9, 2009, https​:/​/ww​​w​.tel​​egrap​​h​. co.​​uk​/ne​​ws​/uk​​news/​​41787​​72​/Ch​​ild​-k​​iller​​-Mary​​-Bell​​-beco​​m es​-a​​-gra​n​​dmoth​​er​-at​​-51​.h​​tml. 15 “Straub on DYLMP2,” November 1996, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bad​​-seed​​. org/​​~cave​​/misc​​/stra​​​ub​.ht​​ml. 16 Tweet from @peterstraubnyc on May 4, 2018.

Chapter 7 1 Chris Maume, “Nick Cave: Devil’s advocate,” Independent, March 11, 2006, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ind​​epend​​ent​.c​​o​.uk/​​news/​​peopl​​e​/ pro​​files​​/nick​​-cave​​-devi​​ls​-ad​​vo​cat​​e​-350​​562​.h​​tml. 2 Paul Slade, Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories that Inspired Them (Soundcheck Books, 2015), 181. 3 Ibid., 184. 4 Ibid., 193. 5 Richard Polenberg, Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales that Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folk Songs (Cornell University Press, 2015), 79. 6 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 220. 7 Ibid., 224. 8 https​:/​/se​​condh​​andso​​ngs​.c​​om​/pe​​rform​​ance/​​56​209​​1​/all​. 9 Liner notes to Frank Proffitt Sings Folk Songs, Folkways Records, 1962. 10 Slade, Unprepared to Die, 214–17.

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Chapter 8 1 Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel (Black Springs Press, 1989, republished by 2.13.61 in 2003), 27. 2 Ibid., 26. 3 https​:/​/se​​condh​​andso​​ngs​.c​​om​/wo​​rk​/90​​482​/v​​ersio​​ns​​#na​​v​ent​​ity. 4 “The Rough Guide to Skip James,” https​:/​/wo​​rldmu​​sic​.n​​et​/pr​​ oduct​​s​/the​​-roug​​h​-gui​​de​-to​​​-skip​​-jame​​s. 5 Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (Chicago Review Press, 1994), 91, ProQuest eBook. 6 Ibid., 132–4. 7 https​:/​/ww​​w​.enc​​yclop​​edia.​​com​/p​​eople​​/lite​​ratur​​e​-and​​-arts​​/ musi​​c​-pop​​ular-​​and​-j​​azz​-b​​iog​ra​​phies​​/skip​​-jame​​s. 8 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville (University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 202. 9 “Jane Shore: The 15th Century Mistress Forced to Walk London’s Street in Her Underwear,” December 15, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.anc​​ient-​​origi​​ns​.ne​​t​/his​​tory-​​famou​​s​-peo​​ple​/j​​ane​​-s​​ hore-​​00111​​74. 10 Sharon Bennett Connolly, “The Infamous Jane Shore,” May 6, 2017, https​:/​/hi​​story​​thein​​teres​​tingb​​its​.c​​om​/20​​17​/05​​/06​/t​​he​-in​​ famo​u​​s​-jan​​e​-sho​​re. 11 Abigail Sparkes, Historic UK History magazine, “Jane Shore,” https​:/​/ww​​w​.his​​toric​​-uk​.c​​om​/Hi​​story​​UK​/Hi​​story​​ofEng​​land​/​​ Jane-​​Shore​. 12 Abbott and Seroff, The Original Blues, 202.

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Chapter 9 1 Great Australian Albums: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, dir. Larry Meltzer, September 13, 2008. 2 Ibid. 3 Roland Boer, Nick Cave: A Study of Love, Death, and Apocalypse (Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2012), 102. 4 The Four Gospels: The Pocket Canon Edition (Canongate Books, 2010), 93. 5 Mark Schwan, “Raven: The Northern Bird of Paradox,” https​:/​/we​​b​.arc​​hive.​​org​/w​​eb​/20​​10010​​20559​​45​/ ht​​tp://​​www​.w​​ildli​​fe​.al​​aska.​​gov​/i​​ndex.​​c​fm​?a​​dfg​=b​​irds.​​raven​. 6 George Muirhead, The Birds of Berwickshire, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1889), 240. 7 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (Vintage Contemporaries, 1991), 166. 8 Alison Flood, “American Psycho Pulled from Shelves by Police in Australia,” The Guardian, July 20, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​ guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​015​/j​​ul​/20​​/amer​​ican-​​psych​​o​-pul​​led​​-p​​ olice​​-aust​​ralia​. 9 Dwyer, “Murder, He Said.” 10 Sebastian Stebe, “Nick Cave—A Murder Ballads Interview Retrospective, 1996,” POP #17, April 1996, reposted at Nick Cave Fixes on May 14, 2010, https​:/​/ni​​ckcav​​efixe​​s​.wor​​dpres​​ s​.com​​/2010​​/05​/1​​4​/nic​​k​-cav​​e​-a​-m​​urder​​-ball​​ads​-i​​nterv​​ie​w​-r​​ etros​​pecti​​ve​-19​​96.

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NOTES

Chapter 10 1 Aaron Carnes, “A Simple Twist of Faith: Reconsidering Bob Dylan’s ‘Christian Period,’ ” Salon, November 4, 2017, https​:/​/ ww​​w​.sal​​on​.co​​m​/201​​7​/11/​​04​/bo​​b​-dyl​​an​-ch​​​risti​​an​-pe​​riod.​ 2 Andrew McCarron, Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan (Oxford University Press, 2017), 152. 3 Ibid. 4 Michael Dwyer, “Murder, He Said,” Rolling Stone Australia, November 1995, http:​/​/www​​.bad-​​seed.​​org/~​​cave/​​inter​​views​​/ 95​-1​​1​_​ozr​​s​.htm​​l. 5 Sebastian Stebe, “Nick Cave—A Murder Ballads Interview Retrospective, 1996,” POP #17, April 1996, reposted at Nick Cave Fixes on May 14, 2010, https​:/​/ni​​ckcav​​efixe​​s​.wor​​dpres​​ s​.com​​/2010​​/05​/1​​4​/nic​​k​-cav​​e​-a​-m​​urder​​-ball​​ads​-i​​nterv​​ie​w​-r​​ etros​​pecti​​ve​-19​​96. 6 Ibid. 7 Clinton Walker, “Nick Cave: Evil’s Elder Statesman,” Triple J Magazine, Summer 1995, 12–17. 8 Dave Thompson, Alternative Rock (Miller Freeman Books, 2000), 246. 9 Nick Cave, The Sick Bag Song (Canongate Books, 2015, paperback edition 2016), 82–3. 10 Stebe, “Nick Cave.” 11 David Fricke, “Death Becomes Him: Nick Cave Acquires a Taste for Murder,” Rolling Stone, May 1996, http:​/​/www​​.bad-​​ seed.​​org/~​​cave/​​inter​​views​​/96​-0​​​5​_rs.​​html.​

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12 Tony Scherman, Entertainment Weekly, March 8, 1996, https​:/​/ew​​.com/​​artic​​le​/19​​96​/03​​/08​/m​​urder​​​-ball​​ads. 13 Olive Woolley Burt, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories (Oxford University Press, 1958), 260.

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Also Available in the Series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

133

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

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A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner

102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi

135

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman

132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland 141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti 142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner 143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler 144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick 145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt 146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall

136

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: 149. The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett 150. 148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier

137

Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson

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