There's No Kill Like Overkill: Down in the Willow Garden

Suppose you're a father whose son is dating a woman you don't approve of. Perhaps she's got some bad habits, or your son doesn't really love her but is a bit too passive aggressive to break things off, or maybe she's gotten pregnant and now he feels obligated to marry her. What kind of fatherly advice would you offer? Maybe you'd say something like "well, raising a child can be tough, but I'll help out" or "well, you'll have to break things off and live with the consequences" or even "here's a train ticket to the coast, get a job on a ship or something and stop whining."

Of course, none of those make for a compelling folk song. If you're a father in a folk song your advice might be, "just kill her and I'll bail you out." Thus continuing the theme of "Don't Look to Folk Songs For Life Advice" with "Down in the Willow Garden" (Roud 446).

The narrator of the song meets his "love" in the titular willow garden where he serves her poisoned wine, which makes her "fall off to sleep," at which point he runs her through with either a saber or a dagger, and THEN throws her in the river, thus earning the dubious honor of a Murder Ballad Triple Crown by killing her three different ways (wait, was she a werewolf or something? I know silver bullets are a the modern method of killing one, but maybe Appalachian werewolves are less hoity-toity and you can just keep killing them until they run out of lives like a video game boss. I may have to re-evaluate my thoughts on this song later).

Anyway, "Down in the Willow Garden" is an American folk ballad that appeared some time in the late 1800s. It may be based on an even older song, and its alternate name of "Rose Connelly" had made appearances in older material, but it probably didn't take its modern form until after 1889, when William Butler Yeats published his poem "Down By the Sally Gardens" which has an almost identical opening line:

Down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet

Of course Yeats may have copped that line from an older Irish ballad "Ye Rambling Boys of Pleasure," (Roud 386) from which he seems to have stolen... er, drawn inspiration for a number of lines.

Since its initial appearance in recorded music in the 1920s, "Down in the Willow Garden" has become a staple of Bluegrass, Country and Folk singers, and has also been recorded by the likes of Bon Iver, Nick Cave and The Everly Brothers. And, of course, it was performed by Holly Hunter in the Cohen Brothers' "Raising Arizona" as a lullaby.

Jealousy and Regret: The Banks of the Ohio

"The Banks of the Ohio" (Roud 157) is a pretty straightforward song as far as these things go, and, as is often the case with these simpler old songs, its history is nearly impossible to trace. What I can tell is that it showed up in the United States sometime in the late 1800s, and was first recorded in the late 1920s. Beyond that, I haven't come across a direct ancestor in European folklore (though the theme of drowning someone out of romantic jealousy is pretty common), so I'm guessing it's an American original.
The story is simple: the guy ("Willie" in many versions) is in love with a girl who likes him at least enough to walk out with him. He wants her to marry him, she's not into it, so he drowns her and then feels bad about it.

It's been performed and recorded a lot, it's an easy song to play (when one isn't fumbling the F chords because your hand is sore) and the chorus makes for a nice sing-along, it's also been made into at least one delightful web comic adaptation.

Perhaps the distinguishing feature about "The Banks of the Ohio" is the theme of regret. After the murder, the narrator laments how he killed the woman he supposedly loved. There are a number of songs about jealous lovers or competing suitors killing someone in a fit of passion, but usually, if there's any aftermath it's either treated as a moment of grotesque justice as in "Mattie Groves" or something they hide until they get caught as in "The Cruel Sister," whereas our narrator has a moment to realize that losing his temper and drowning a woman was A TERRIBLE IDEA.

I mean, it shouldn't take even a three-and-a-half minute folk song to figure that out, but we live and we learn, right?