Murder ballads old & new : a dark and bloody record /

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Includes bibliographical references and index.Introduction -- Chapter One: Ancient History: Origins of the Modern Murder Ballad -- Digging for Clues in the Fatal Flower Garden -- You Can't Win a Race with a Cannonball -- The Triplett Tragedy -- Pat Hare Murders His Baby -- Chapter Two: Hardly Getting Over It: Contemporary Reckonings with Tragedy -- Suffer Little Children -- Getting Home Alive -- Like a God with a Thunderbolt -- And Everybody Cried -- Chapter Three: Game Changers, Outlaws, and Folk HeroesA Walkin' Chunk a Mean-Mad -- Postcards of the Hanging -- The Day John Kennedy Died -- Charles Manson Murders the '60s -- Chapter Four: Hard Work and Hard Times: Songs of Labor and Strife -- And Who Killed the Miner? -- Honey, Take a Whiff on Me -- Hard Time Killing Floor -- Worse than the Thing that Possessed Me -- Chapter Five: Fancies of Love, Fantasies of Death -- Whisperer in Darkness -- Full Moon, Dark Heart -- Murder in the Red Barn -- When You Get to the Bottom, We'll Kiss You to Sleep -- Chapter Six: Lost and Found -- Wrecks on the Highway -- In the Cool Room -- On the Rails, Alive and Dead -- Coda: Hurt -- Outro -- Acknowledgements -- Song Licensing Acknowledgments -- Index: The Victims, Crimes, & Tragedies that Inspired the Songs -- Back CoverMurder Ballads Old & New: A Dark and Bloody Record is an exploration of an age-old topic-- our human need to document the horrors of the world around us. The murder ballad, here expanded to include songs about traumatic loss in modern variants and multiple styles, including punk, post-punk, alt-country, and folk. The book is a graveyard stroll past tombs both well-kept and half-hidden. Murder Ballads Old & New excavates facts about killers, victims, and the folkloric storytellers who disseminated their tales in song. Author Steven L. Jones focuses the tragic ballad as "an act of remembering and a soul-reckoning with the ineffable." Songs examined range from obscure tunes from the founding days of the United States to familiar canonical songs learned in schoolrooms and honkytonks. Jones tackles each song in a manner that's equal parts musicological, psychosocial, and genealogical as he uncovers stories that reveal larger contexts and maps the lineages of songs and themes, forebears, and ancestors. Murder Ballads Old & New includes a wide range of songs and performers from the relatively unknown (Boiled in Lead, Freakons, Nelstone's Hawaiians) to the ironically famous (Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth). Highlights include tales of Muddy Waters guitar sideman Pat Hare, whose incendiary blues boast "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" proved grimly prophetic. And honky-tonk pioneer Eddie Noack, whose morbid stab at late-career rebirth, "Psycho," couldn't match the bottomless tragedy of his own life. As well as Depression-era holdup man Pretty Boy Floyd, Schubert's mythical Erlkönig, and the Manson Family. Murder Ballads Old & New is a compelling delve into the perennial American fascination with True Crime. Includes archival and historical black & white images.--