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?

Dead Lovers Live!

I've been pretty quiet for a while, but I have been working on music. In fact, next month I'll be performing some of the songs here in Madison, along with some of my favorite local musicians.

Event info can be found on Facebook here, but for those of you who aren't connected:

Matt DeBlass and Friends: The Dead Lovers Project
at Bos Meadery, Saturday Jan. 13 7-9 pm
849 E Washington St, Madison Wisconsin.

It begins!

I've got the start of my first track, Anachie Gordon down. The recording was the easy (for me) part, now for all the digital tweaks and edits.
The unedited track is available for a listen here. 

Plans and Progress

Between the day job and other distractions I haven't gotten as much done on this project as I'd have liked, but such is life!

One of the things that has struck me as I've been looking at material is the sheer number of songs that fall into the Dead Lovers category. That's got me thinking that this might be fun to keep going with beyond a single recording. Also, having done a lot of thinking on overdubbing, digital instruments and the like, I'm realizing what I'd really like to do is try to get an actual band together around performing some of this stuff. 

With that all in mind, what I'm thinking is that I'm going to start small and simple with my initial recording work for what we'll call "Dead Lovers Volume I" and make a fairly traditional folk album out of it. By that I mean fairly live sounding, instrument and voice with minimal editing or overdubs. I figure this will be a fairly harp-driven thing, because... well, harp is good for singing about tragic romances. 

From that, I hope to recruit a few other collaborators who would be interested in the project and take it in a bit more "folk rock" direction. My ideal group would be a trio with with harp, cello and percussion, and include a female vocalist to do harmonies and trade leads on, but I have to see who I can find who thinks this might be fun. I'm hoping with the first recording in hand I can start reaching out to the local music scene to see if anyone else wants to play. 

I'm going to start laying down some basic tracks this week and playing with my minimalist recording setup (a decent USB mic and a basic DAW for now) and will hopefully have some halfway decent audio to post here soon. 

Maimed Lovers (and some notes on instrumentation): Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye

Several of the songs we've explored here have characters die in battle, but what if you want to write a tragic ballad where the lover doesn't die?

In the 19th-Century broadsheet ballad "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" (Roud 3137) the titular Johnny has gone off in the military, leaving his sweetheart behind in Athy, County Kildare, with a newborn child (depending on the version, it may be made clear that they weren't married, and the child may be the result of a "fond farewell" to the young hero). 

Johnny was off in "Sulloon" or Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) which was under British rule at the time and he was seriously wounded. By "seriously" I mean "Anakin Skywalker at the end of Episode III" wounded. Young Johnny lost his arms, legs and eyes in fighting there and was destined to live out the rest of his time as a beggar. It seems likely the fighting references was decades earlier during the Kandyan Wars, or possibly the more recent Matale Rebellion. 

The song was first published in 1867 and is credited to songwriter Joseph B. Geoghegan, who wrote several music hall songs that have passed into the folk tradition. It appears to be a parody of the 1863 Civil War marching song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" by Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore.

 It's sometimes speculated that the much darker "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye" was the older song, and the American version was a "cleaned up" take on it, but documents don't seem to bear that out. Personally, I think it's a very believable idea that a songwriter would take a popular marching song and make a grim parody of it by replacing the patriotic optimism with a tale about the gruesome consequences of war. The song also nicely captured a theme of the growing Irish Independence movement: young men from Ireland, itself a nation under British rule, were recruited to go fight and suffer abroad in other British colonies, to help the Crown keep its power. 

Although it's not confirmed, I also suspect that the song influenced Dalton Trumbo's book "Johnny Got His Gun" in which the protagonist suffers a similar fate during fighting in World War I. 

In a lot of later versions, including my own, the last verse of the song has kind of an epilogue:  "they're rolling out the guns again... but they'll never take our sons again," making for a powerful anti-war statement. 

I've actually got two videos to go with this song, to illustrate something that's been on my mind as I make plans for the final recording. In the older one I accompany myself with the harp, the newer I use the guitar. In both I use the traditional tune "The Road to Lisdoonvarna" as an intro. 

In many ways, both versions of the song are pretty similar. Instrument choice does have an effect on the texture of the song, but in both cases the focus should be, for better worse, on my voice. And if I'm recording a multitracked version of it, there's no reason that I can't blend both guitar and harp in the final mix. The choice of instrument has a lot more effect on eventual live performances in support of the recording. 

Both instruments have their pros and cons. I really enjoy playing the harp, and find it much easier to play instrumental pieces on it because, one, I'm more proficient at it, and two, because it's nature makes it easier to play accompanying chords with the left hand while playing  melody with the right. On the other hand, the guitar is better for rhythmic strumming and driving faster songs. It's also easier to travel with, having fewer strings to deal with and a more compact shape. For traveling out of town (say, flying back East) it also has the advantage of being easily fit into a hardshell case (a flight-worthy case for the harp would have to be custom made and cost upwards of $500) and having replacement parts and strings available in any local music shop. 

What may end up happening is that I record this project with a wide variety of instruments, and then take it "on the road" with just a guitar, or guitar and mandolin. It's pretty predictable as far as folk music goes, and I'm honestly not that great a guitar player, but it's a much simpler option. We'll see. 

The Arranging Dilemma

It's been a busy couple months and I haven't added any new songs or updates for a bit, but the Dead Lovers Project will be continuing into the new year, and I'm about ready to start the first recordings.

But I've got to make some decisions first.

Generally, when I've done solo recordings, my goal has been to capture as "live" an experience as possible, with few or no overdubs and only a single instrument and my voice. This is a pretty common way to record traditional folk artists, and it's pretty simple system. You set up a microphone or two, and play the song through several times until you get a take you're happy with. A number of traditional and classical artists record this way still.

Now, when I've worked with a group, there have been several instruments and vocalists involved, and in most cases these were all recorded one at a time. First a "scratch" track would be laid out, usually with guitar and voice, then a better rhythm guitar track, a polished vocal track and then any instrumental overdubs needed. Often there would be extra instrumental tracks to fill out the sound, sometimes involving harmonies and instruments that the group would never be using in a live performance. Afterwards, there would be tuning and tweaking to hide mistakes and fix off notes. This would result in an idealized version of what the song could sound like, and is probably the most common way of recording rock and popular music.

A third way of doing a record, which I've debated trying and never attempted, is for a single artist to record multiple tracks, and maybe even mix in some electronic rhythm tracks. I've thought about venturing into the "folktronica" realm with this sort of thing, updating and modernizing the sound by mixing acoustic and digital instruments together. It would be something new to me, but could lead to some cool results.

Now the first way of recording is well within my comfort zone, and within the capabilities of the equipment I already own. I can run cardiod or condensor microphones directly into my little Tascam recorder and mix it to my computer. I can even do some limited overdubbing this way, and there are free audio programs like Audacity that let me tweak the sound to some degree. My home laptop is... OK for this sort of thing, although it's been getting cranky and noisy lately, but I've done a couple of projects this way.

If I wanted to do a more elaborately mixed and arranged album, I'd need some additional equipment. Digital interfaces that let me record directly to my computer and better software. Or, one thing I've seen some artists work with lately is recording directly to an iPad using a dedicated interface. This has the advantage of portability and simplicity and having a device dedicated to recording and music production would help me keep myself organized (always a difficult task in my case). Whichever way I go about it, I'd need to buy at least a few hundred dollars worth of gear.

Of course, I could also book time at a recording studio, but that gets pricey quickly, and I'd have to have a very clear idea of what I wanted, with less room for experimentation than a home recording.

I still haven't quite figured out what I want to do yet. I still also have a couple songs I'd like to learn, but I could start recording the ones I know well before I finish the learning of the new (to me) ones.

Anyway, that's where my head is at lately! Hopefully I'll have more read progress to post soon.

Happy New Year all!