Dead Lovers in the Machine Age: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning

For most of the upcoming recording project (which I'll be starting on soon, I've got a bit of gear to acquire in the next few weeks and then I'll be putting down basic tracks), I'll be focusing on songs from the 1800s, However, it's worth noting that the tradition of Dead Lover ballads is alive and well in modern music as well.

Songs like "Last Kiss," and "Leader of the Pack" adapted the tradition of the departed loved one to the popular music of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming their own genre known as "Teenage Tragedy Songs." The genre waned in popularity by the late 1960s but never quite went away. While a number of these modern songs describe death in battle (particularly in more patriotic offerings), by disease or by drug overdose, the number one killer of sweethearts in songs of the past half-century or so seems to be the automobile.

It's not surprising, as the cars became more common and accessible in the latter half of the 20th Century, traffic fatalities rose steadily, only declining relatively recently. Car crashes were, and still are, one of the prime killers of healthy young people, and carry with them the shock of suddenness and reflect the dark side of the independence that a car offers to teenagers. All pretty dramatic psychological stuff!

This week's song does center around a motor vehicle, but it actually outlives our protagonist.

"1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a song by Richard Thompson off his 1991 album "Rumor and Sigh." It tells the kind of story that should be familiar to aficionados of all sorts of Dead Lover ballads: a brash young outlaw is in love with a red-haired maiden, but he is mortally wounded in a caper gone wrong and only has time to profess his love for her and offer her a token of his eternal devotion before breathing his last.

The twist, of course, is that it's set in the modern(ish) day, and young James dies of a shotgun blast to the chest during an armed robbery near London, and the "token" he leaves behind is his beloved motorcycle.

Thompson chose that particular vehicle to include in his modernized ballad in particular because of it's rarity and fame. The Black Lightning was the fastest production bike in the world when it was made, and only 30 of them were built in 1952, it was equivalent to the magic sword or elfin steed of earlier stories. It was also distinctly British, which was important to Thompson in setting this particular song in his home country.

It's a wonderful song and it's been covered beautifully by far more worthy artists than myself, but it's well worth picking up the album or listening to a live rendition by the man himself (he's a seriously brilliant guitar player, not just a great songwriter)

It may just be true that nothing beats a '52 Vincent and a red-headed girl.

For Men Must Work and Women Must Weep (Labor Day Special): Three Fishers

In 1851 an Anglican preacher by the name of Charles Kingsley published a poem based on recollections of his childhood in Clovelly, a small coastal town in southwest England mostly populated by herring fishermen and their families. Of course, Kingsley likely had many sunny summer afternoons enjoying the salt air of the seashore, but we're talking Dead Lovers songs here, so his poem was obviously not one of that sort.

Instead, Kingsley recalled a day "when the old bay lay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts stalking across the waves before the northern gale," and the local fleet of tiny herring boats fleeing before the storm trying fruitlessly to make their way between the waves and the rocky coastline while the fishermen's families watched helplessly from shore. "Corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child," he said, "till in one case alone saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans weeping over those who had gone out the night before."

As an adult, Kingsley became a priest and author and was involved in the Christian Socialist movement. He was an advocate for the rights of the working class and for protecting them against abuse and exploitation by the wealthy. After being chastised for preaching on the topic, he recalled the dangers and hardships faced by the poor fishermen he knew in his youth, and wrote his famous poem, "Three Fishers." It was set to music shortly thereafter, and became a popular Victorian parlor song. At some point it entered the folk tradition, with the help of Canadian musicians Stan and Garnet Rogers, has become popular again with a slightly different melody than its original setting.

The phrase "Men must work and women must weep," became something of a catchprase in the Victorian labor movement. At the time, of course, many of the most dangerous jobs, including commercial fishing, mining and factory work were done almost exclusively by men (though the pre-union era wasn't exactly a safe time for working class women either), and their wives had to face the possibility that the man they loved and counted on might be killed or crippled at any time, leaving them and their children to face starvation and homelessness.

The song is perhaps so moving because, rather than focus on the struggle of the men caught in the storm, it focuses on the helplessness of those left on the shore. The wives sit up at night keeping the lighthouse flame going with some degree of determination, but you get the sense as "they looked at the squall and they looked at the shower" they knew there was little hope. To me the most chilling line in the whole song is "for the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep." It's a reminder that for these people, poor working class families, there's no gracious period of extended mourning, but yet another day full of chores and tasks ahead of them, children to feed, a house to manage, now made infinitely harder with the loss of a husband. There may be a little sleep to be had when the crying is done, but there will be no rest.

This isn't a song about wealthy women pining away for their suitors or knights bravely dying for love, but people facing a hard and storm-lashed existence, yet still trying to love and support each other. When they're gone all that's left is the moaning of the wind across the sandbar.

Rebellion, Resurrection and Revenge!: The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Some  Dead Lover Ballads feature lovers who were slain in warfare, or found a violent end. In most of these cases the story focuses on the surviving lover grieving for their lost partner and taking a pretty passive "woe is me" stance which is typical of the ballad genre. However in this case the young man narrating the story reacts to the killing of his sweetheart with a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

"The Wind That Shakes The Barley" (Roud 2994) is one of those ballads for which we actually have a known author. It was written by poet and scholar Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830-1883) in 1861 about the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798. It tell of a young rebel who is trying to tell his sweetheart that he plans to leave her behind to fight in the rebellion. As they're talking, however, a British (or loyalist militiaman) shoots her and kills her. The young rebel then joins the rebel forces at the Battle of Oulart Hill as they slaughtered a small detachment of the British Army.

The young man then goes on to state that it's more likely than not that he'll be joining his love in the afterlife soon enough. Cheerful stuff!

The history of the many rebellions and the ongoing conflict between the Irish and British colonial rule is long, complicated, and far beyond the scope of a single folk music blog post, but to touch very briefly on what was going on in the 1790s, well, the British were being pretty terrible.

To grossly oversimplify, at the time, anyone Catholic (which included the vast majority of native Irish) had their rights severely restricted. They either couldn't own or were very limited in what land they could have, had not right to public office or to the vote, and were mostly ruled over by a small upper class of British protestant landlords. Around that time the few Catholics with any influence and Protestant sympathizers pushed for better treatment and more representation. They had some success, but achieved nothing near equality and that frustration, along with the influence of the more successful revolutions in America and France, stirred up a rebellion against the British.

France was supposed to lend military support, but various circumstances and crossed signals led to a lot of failures. And in response British forces in Ireland responded with tactics that would make even today's "tough on terror" crowd blanche. British forces burned homes and murdered those suspected of supporting the rebellion, and used torture methods such as half-hanging and pitchcapping (look them up if you want to, but they're not nice things, trust me) to attempt to extract information or (more likely) to intimidate Irish citizens.

In the days leading up to this particular battle, British militiamen burned a number of homes and killed civilians all around the Wexford area. The narrator's sweetheart may have been fictional, but her fate was very much based on real events. Once Irish forces had massed, though, they greatly outnumbered the British, and by holding the high ground and having set up an ambush near the battle lines, they killed almost all of the British troops.

Other encounters during the short-lived uprising didn't go so well and by the autumn of that year the rebellion was over, though resistance to British rule would continue at various level of intensity until the Republic of Ireland had formed in the 20th Century, and beyond in Northern Ireland, which is still under the flag of the United Kingdom, a fact which not everyone who lives there is entirely thrilled about (though, like I said, I'm not going to even try to tell that whole story here).

One important, but easily overlooked bit of symbolism, though, is worth noting. The Irish rebels were sometimes called "Croppy Boys" for their close-cropped haircuts. Often the Irish who were killed in battle, or executed as prisoners would be buried in unmarked mass graves, which were nicknamed "Croppy Holes" A lot of these men carried rations made up of barley grains with them, and after a time the grains that were in the pockets of the dead men would sprout from the ground of the Croppy Holes, which the Irish took as a symbol of how their resistance to British rule would rise, again and again, no matter how many times it was cut down.

The wind through the barley isn't just an example of a pretty rural setting for this story, it's a powerful symbol for a movement that continued beyond the end of our Dead Lovers, and into the modern day.

Without Words: Gow's Lament

Most of the characters in the songs I've covered are fictional, or are, at the very least, only very loosely based on real-life characters. However, real people do suffer the losses and heartbreaks that the characters in these songs and stories do, and sometimes they are moved to express themselves musically.

One such case was the famed Scottish fiddler and composer Neil Gow, who lived from 1727 to 1807. Gow was married twice, first to Margaret Wiseman, who bore his eight children (including his son Nathaniel Gow, a noted composer in his own right) and after her death to Margaret Urquhart, whom he remained with from 1768 until her death in 1805 (Margaret is a pretty common name in Scotland).

When Margaret died, Gow was an old man who had outlived two wives and all but two of his own children. In this tune we can hear not only the sadness of losing his companion of half a lifetime, but some sweetness and playfulness as well. It's a fitting memorial, and it speaks volumes without a single word.

Of Swans and Siblings: The Cruel Sister

There's a special bond between siblings. Brothers and sisters may fight and squabble, but when it's all said and done, they're your closest friends and allies and you know they'll always have your back.

Except those times when they'll straight up kill you, as is the case in this week's Dead Lovers Ballad, "The Cruel Sister," (Roud 8, Child 10) also known as "The Twa Sisters," "The Bonny Swans" and a bunch of other names.

In this version of the song there are two sisters who live in some remote home by the North Sea. They're visited by a knight who comes a-courting, paying attention to both sisters, but clearly favoring the younger. The older sister, unable to bear the idea that her younger sibling might be married off before she is, tosses the girl into the ocean to drown.

That's when things get weird.

The younger sister's corpse washes up on a beach somewhere and is found by some wandering minstrels. Instead of running off to the authorities to report the a dead body or even just giving the girl a decent burial, they cut up her corpse and make a harp out of it, and string it with her hair (in some versions they use finger bones as tuning pegs or other gruesome details). They take this bone-harp to the wedding of the older sister (who, after offing her competition apparently gets that knight to propose pretty quick) where it suddenly begins to play itself, and somehow tells the story of how the bride murdered her younger sister. In this version that's where it all ends, though some versions tell of how the murderess is executed (pulled apart by a mill wheel, hanged, etc.).

This is an old ballad, dating back to at least the mid-1600s, but with connections not only to other musical renditions, but to many prose stories as well and in several languages. In the musical versions, the siblings are often sisters, but in the story versions, they may be brothers as well. Many versions describe the dead girl as floating "like a swan" in some way, or tie swans into the imagery of the story somehow, In the well-known Loreena McKennitt version, the swan imagery is repeated in between the lines of narration, while the version I played (which is a fairly modern take based on a version from Old Blind Dogs, which is based on a version from Pentangle) uses "Lay the bent to the bonny broom" which originally comes from another, even older song, "Riddles Wisely Expounded," (Child Ballad Number 1! Roud 161) which also lent elements to a popular folk ballad which was famously recorded by Simon and Garfunkel as"Scarborough Fair." There is some debate as to what laying the bent to the bonny broom actually means, but it seems to be some sort of good-luck incantation, or ward against evil (or it may just be a fancy way of saying "go lay yourselves down in the long grass and get it on," a distinct possibility in any song, folk, pop or other). This form of refrain, a repeating line that has little or nothing to do with the narration of the song's story is referred to as a "burden," which derives from the French bordoun, or drone, as these lines add a kind of repetitive accompaniment to the lines of exposition.

The idea of an older sister being bitterly jealous of a younger sibling marrying before her is not that far-fetched, after all, even many close siblings suffer from jealousy and resentment on occasion, and it's still considered a bit socially awkward, in some circles at least, to be an older, unmarried sibling while your younger brothers or sisters are happily married off. Add to this the dim prospects in some historical time periods for unwed women (or women in general, but slightly less so for those with a well-to-do husband) and the remote location of the family's holdings making potential suitors few and far between, and you've got a recipe for a good old-fashioned murder ballad.

Now, about the creepy minstrels. While there is some lore associating musicians and bards with pre-christian religion and all sorts of druidic tradition, I think this falls more into the camp of "grateful dead" folklore. "Grateful Dead" stories are classified in the Aarne-Thompson index (the folk tale equivalent of the Roud and Child indices) as tales about a ghost with unfinished business who somehow rewards a living person who helps them resolve that business (and yes, that's where the band The Grateful Dead got its name). The minstrels in this case are acting as agents of the dead girl and bringing her sister to justice. I'm not sure what, exactly, the musicians get out of this, although maybe they get to keep the harp. A harp made out of bones is probably pretty cool. I don't think it would sound very good, but it'd look impressive anyway.

Now I kind of want one.

A Near Miss: The Maid Freed From The Gallows

This week's song is not technically a Dead Lover ballad the way that I happen to know it, however, in its most famous form, it definitely qualifies.

I learned "The Maid Freed From The Gallows" (Child 95, Roud 144) from The Ballad Book of John Jacob Niles, but there are many, many versions found not just in the English-language tradition, but across continental Europe as well, dating back to at least 1770. The Roud index lists more than 300 entries for the song and they all tell basically the same story, though there are two different possible endings. It appears under a variety of different names, including the above-mentioned "Maid Freed...etc, etc" as well as "The Hangman," "The Ropesman," "The Gallows Tree," "The Prickly Bush," "The Sorrow Tree" and others.

In the song a young woman is about to be hanged, and asks the hangman to delay just a bit, as she sees someone coming who may offer a bribe if he'll spare her. Each person who shows up, usually a family member, arrives empty-handed until finally the condemned woman's lover arrives with the requisite bribe of gold to save her from her fate.

Some variations change the condemned to a young man, and yet others shift the perspective to the third person, telling of a devoted daughter or wife trying to save their father or husband. In these variations the woman will often sleep with the hangman in order to dissuade him from killing their loved one. Sometimes it works, but other times the hangman both takes the bribes and has sex with the woman, but then hangs the prisoner anyway.

Such is the case in probably the best-known of the variations, "Gallows Pole" as recorded by Led Zeppelin on their 1970 album Led Zeppelin III. Jimmy Page first heard the song on a recording by 12-string guitar pioneer Fred Gerlach (whose version was in turn based on that of his friend Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter) and adapted for the band.

In this version the friends of the condemned show up but are "too damn poor" to offer anything to save him. The prisoner's brother then shows up with some silver and "a little gold" to bribe the hangman. The prisoner's sister then arrives and he asks her to take the hangman off to "some shady bower" and persuade him to let her brother go. The hangman takes a look at everything on offer and still laughs at the prisoner and pulls the lever to drop him to his death.

The better known versions are pretty sparse on information on just why the protagonist is about to be hanged.  In the Ledbetter/Gerlach version it seems to come down to race and class discrimination, and the very believable idea that authorities in some places would threaten to hang a man for petty crimes as a way to extort money from his family and friends. In older European versions however, it seems that there's a fairy-tale logic of the maiden having lost a golden ball or other precious object and is condemned as punishment.

Another interesting explanation is that the young woman was captured by pirates and was being held for ransom, with the threat of hanging used to encourage her family to pay up. Apparently back in the day ransoming prisoners was big business during wartime, and profitable for pirates during times of relative peace.

A final possibility that I've come across is that the"gold" stood for the young woman's virtue (ie, her virginity) and as young woman who may have been branded immoral, or possibly even pregnant out of wedlock she may have been doomed because of it until her lover stepped up and offered to redeem her by marrying her. I'm not a fan of this one, personally, because first of all it smacks a kind of icky puritanism that I'm not very fond of, but mostly because it would seem uncharacteristic of a genre of songs which happily deals in murder and adultery. Moralizing over a woman's virginity seems pretty dull compared to the possibility of pirates.

Death by Social Disease: Pills of White Mercury

Before I start in on this week's post,  I'd like to give a shout to another group who does real justice to a classic Dead Lover ballad!.  Valentine Wolfe has just released this most excellent version of "I Am Stretched On Your Grave." I've been fortunate enough to perform at a lot of the same events as these two, and they're both great musicians and lovely people. 

As you may recall, I mentioned this song in my post about "The Unquiet Grave." VW's version is very reminiscent of the Dead Can Dance rendition of the song, and is well worth a listen. 

OK, now that you've enjoyed something haunting and beautiful, let's talk about syphilis!

Syphilis, as we know it today is a serious but easily treatable disease in the developed world, and is, of course, spread largely through sexual contact. When it first appeared in Europe sometime in the 15th Century though, it was much more virulent and nearly impossible to treat. Eventually by the time this week's song started to appear in the 18th Century as "The Unfortunate Rake (Roud 2), physicians had been having some luck treating it with "White Mercury" (mercury chloride), leading to the title of this Scottish variant known as "Pills of White Mercury." 

The downsides of treating anything with mercury is that while it will kill off the bacteria causing the disease, there's a very, very good chance that it might kill the patient as well. At the very least, these chemicals had some pretty severe side effects which were often confused or closely associated with the effects of the disease. And the mercury treatment was most effective in the early stages, when the infection was pretty localized (it involves open sores in sensitive spots, do yourself a favor and do NOT go looking for images of it) and the patient otherwise healthy. Hence the "had she but told me of it in time." 

Penicillin is awesome. 

The song has many variants, and several different melodies, but one of things that ties them all together - and sets them apart from other Dead Lover songs - is the frankness with which it treats its subject matter. Not only is it addressing the issue of sexually transmitted disease, but it's pretty honest about how gross the lingering death caused by some of those diseases could be ("give each of them a bunch of red roses/so when I pass by ye won't know the smell"). 

I think it's that very frankness that has made the song so popular over the years. It's a bit transgressive to talk openly about sleeping around, which of course makes it memorable and interesting (just think about all the folk songs about drinking and fighting, bad behavior makes good entertainment). It can also be viewed as a bit of a cautionary tale, "don't be like me, or you'll meet a sorry end rotting away in a hospital," or as an old saying went, warning about casual sex in the pre-antibiotic days, "a night with Venus leads to a lifetime with Mercury." On the other hand, it's made pretty clear that if the young man's partner had let him know that she'd picked up a souvenir of her own dalliances, things probably would have been OK, so the moral may actually be "please consult a reliable physician if you think you may be ill or suddenly develop open sores on your private parts dear lord what is wrong with you people?"

In fact, this song is nearly a parody of some of the more sentimental "dying of disease" ballads that populate other corners of the Dead Lovers world. Usually the disease in question is some "ladylike" disease such as consumption (tuberculosis) that leaves the sufferer romantically pale and faint, but doesn't have the nasty outward manifestation that something like syphilis does. Plus these diseases don't require any intimate contact, leaving the image of the sufferer as fragile, innocent and virginal as they're carried off to heaven like they angel their lover knows them to be. Syphilis, by contrast, is pretty gross and was associated with loose morals and casual sex (or outright prostitution). 

So "good" lovers pine away and die without ever doing more than innocently touching hands, "bad" lovers die an uglier death, but the bawdy song tradition says, "hey, at least they got to have a little fun first." 

Interestingly, in the American West, this song evolved in a totally different direction (well, not totally, the dude still dies). It became a cowboy ballad called, among other things, Streets of Laredo (Roud 223650), and tells the story of a young man dying not of disease, but of a gunshot wound. Now, cowboys were not known for being particularly prudish, and sexually transmitted diseases were absolutely an issue reported among prostitutes and their patrons in the frontier towns of the Wild West (though by the early 1900s, reliable treatments that were less likely to kill the patient than to cure them were becoming available), so I suspect that the change was less due to concern about the salacious nature of the original and more due to a desire to "freshen up" an old favorite, and to make it fit into the gunslinger mythos which was popular at the time. At the same time, it's still a cautionary tale of bad behavior, as the young victim acknowledges he's "done wrong" and fell into wicked ways which led to his demise. 

Now, I don't know if "Pills of White Mercury" will make it onto the final Dead Lovers recording, not because I'm squeamish about the subject matter, but because I've recorded a good version of it already with Baroque & Hungry! Still, it's a staple of my live shows and has just enough gory detail to make it fun.