The best initial evidence of this is that artists keep working at refining this song and keeping it a going concern. That is, as I intend to draw out over a few posts, this song is enduring and powerful because it taps into something rather elemental in human experience. Whether or not we classify the song as a murder ballad is probably less important than demonstrating that this song has some pretty powerful currents within it–currents that appealed to 17th and 18th century audiences, and currents that appeal to 21st century audiences. In the end, I think we’ll see that at least one branch of the song is a murder ballad, while all of the branches touch on themes that resonate deeply with categories of emotional truth and moral judgment that we find in some of our other musical tales.
There are many people digging through the strata on this “site.” What I mainly hope to do is provide you with a set of issues and themes to consider, rather than doing a complete archaeological excavation of the song in all its variety–again, if I can help myself. As we’ll discover, it’s not an entirely neat fit, but it is at least a worthwhile comparison. My hope today is to outline the framework of Child 243, and then to discuss the song as a murder ballad. A number of existing on-line resources provide a bibliographical take on the song, so it won’t be my aim to fully reprise them here–if I can help myself. As with “Two Sisters,” there is probably more to it than one week, and certainly one blogger, can unearth. This may only be the first of a few weeks, occasionally distributed over the months ahead, on this song. Child Ballad 243, “The Demon Lover” or “House Carpenter” gives us an excellent example of this kind of collaborative project, using and endlessly revising a story to drill down to a core truth. Many voices find a power in a song’s narrative, and keep working at honing the song to capture that essential power. It’s clearly a collaborative project, both between the artist and the song and among artists and interpreters–and the truth is often more emotional truth than it is factual truth, to whatever extent the facts are relevant in the song. More relevantly, the truth is something that art approaches through metaphor and indirection. What lengths will a singer go to in changing the song’s “facts” to keep closer to the song’s “truth”? While I generally believe that neither facts nor truth are completely relative, in the search to express meaning in a song, the truth is something that we often meet half way. “The Demon Lover” from ‘Ballads Weird and Wonderful’ (Vernon Hill, 1912)
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