This recording is a collection of American ballads, and a strange and wondrous thing it is. The CD accompanies a hefty book of essays, articles, letters and even a classic comic strip about the American ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus. “Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad,” is the sub-title; “Doomed lovers, highway shooters, a nation lost and found” is … well, something else, the sub-sub-title I guess.
“This collection and the book of the same name it accompanies grow out of a single question: what does the American ballad say about America?” the editors say in the CD booklet. One of the answers, supplied by the songs on this CD, is that America is obsessed with sex and death, crime and punishment, God, roads and race.
The first three tracks pretty much summarize the roots of the American ballad: “Barbary Allen,” “Pretty Polly” and “Ommie Wise.” Jean Ritchie’s unaccompanied 1961 recording of “Barbary Allen” is one of more than 100 known versions of the song in Virginia alone, but it has to be one of the most powerful recordings of this ballad from which the book and CD take their title. The song of a young man dying of a broken heart and the girl who caused it dying of grief afterward, and the twining of the rose and the briar that grow out of their graves obviously speaks to something deep in the national psyche. As does “Pretty Polly,” the stripped-down tale of the man who kills his naive young lover, delivered here quite strongly by a female stringband called The Coon Creek Girls in 1938. And G.B. Grayson on fiddle and vocals in 1927 recorded the story of the 1807 murder perpetrated by Ommie Wise, to the tune best known as “Wabash Cannonball.”
But it’s not all Appalachian stringband songs; far from it. The American ballad tradition encompasses such diverse songs as Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” and Bob Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” The Mexican influence on American music is represented by Vicente Fernandez’s “Volver, Volver,” a mariachi-style take with lots of organ tremelo. The blues is represented by Koerner, Ray & Glover’s “Deliah’s Gone,” and Mississippi John Hurt’s sublime version of “Frankie,” sometimes known as “Frankie & Johnnie” or “Frankie & Albert”; Bob Dylan’s 1992 version on Good As I Been to You seems quite strongly influenced by Hurt’s. For soul or R&B there’s Bobby Patterson’s “Trial of Mary Maguire,” a trial song in which justice triumphs for a change. And jazz is represented by Jelly Roll Morton’s lively and only slightly cleaned-up “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” (often rendered as “Funky Butt Blues”) recorded in 1939 by Alan Lomax. The only recording that really seems out of place is the Duke Ellington/Mahalia Jackson “Come Sunday.” It’s sublime, but doesn’t seem to fit anywhere here, particularly between “El Paso” and Burl Ives’s “Foggy Foggy Dew.”
Some of the most interesting songs are the most recent. Dolly Parton’s “Down From Dover” is chillingly powerful, giving as it does the woman’s point of view of the results of an illicit love affair. Randy Newman’s sardonic “Sail Away” is as cinematic in its way as Dylan’s “Lily,” and has the added advantage of lots of sarcastic humor. Bruce Springsteen’s masterful “Nebraska” is but one more retelling of the murdering highwayman ballad, this one set much more recently. And it’s good to see the Handsome Family — modern practitioners of the murder ballad in many forms — represented here with Paul Muldoon’s “Blackwatertown,” a darkly humorous tale of a man led astray by a woman, to a tune best known in America as “Streets of Laredo.”
Having said all that, I’m still not sure what to say about this CD. Great songs, every single one, although I’m not crazy about a couple of renditions. But it’s more of an academic exercise than a listening experience; otherwise, the presence of such disparate elements as “Dead Man’s Curve,” “Come Sunday,” and “Nebraska” in one package makes little sense. Let’s just say this isn’t a comp CD you’d put together yourself to give to your girlfriend or boyfriend, unless you’re a musicologist.
(Columbia/Legacy, 2004)
