The Nation's Pulse: Hang Down Your Head
Chapman, Stepehen
THE NATION'S PULSE by Stephen Chapman Hang Down Your Head 0 ne unnoticed sign of the decline of American civilization is the death of the killing song. Anyone who was around in the 1950's can...
...Charley Pride had a hit with "The Snakes Crawl at Night," in which he recounted how he blew away his paramour and her secret boyfriend...
...That collection included what is probably the greatest killing song ever put on vinyl...
...That's all there is to it...
...This type of music—if that's the right word—is to the killing song what an XXX-video is to "Salome...
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...That ballad, like most of its ilk, was a tribute to the power of passion but also an instructive reminder of the need to keep it under control...
...After stabbing her, he recalls laconically, "I took her by her golden curls, / I drug her down to the riverside, /And as I threw her in to drown, /I watched her as she floated down...
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...It's not as P.C...
...77 is contribute to the demise of winsome, all-American ballads about homicide...
...I don't know who Julia Roberts is seeing these days, but I'll bet there are nights when it disturbs his sleep...
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...as it used to be to kill your beloved," says Bruce Iglauer, president of the blues label Alligator Records...
...At the end he gets sentenced to death, but not before informing the judge that the victims were treacherous reptiles...
...would have made the perfect subject for one of these ballads, if only he'd ended up swinging from a gallows...
...But Lovett once confessed that he wrote the song as a revenge fantasy about a girlfriend who jilted him...
...The Kingston Trio, who sang so many folk songs involving fatalities that today the group would be the target of an FBI investigation, could hardly improve on "The Everglades," which had all the essentials and more...
...The narrator in one Johnny Cash song found himself in Folsom Prison because "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die...
...Homicide is bound to seem a bit less romantic when the murder rate soars, as it has since the placid 195o's —America's safest period since World War I. Nowadays we can more than satisfy our fascination with violent endings by watching the 1c) o'clock news...
...Like Shakespeare's tragedies, it concerns the vital stuff of life and death, but typically in four minutes or less...
...After fatally perforating a rival in a barroom gunfight, our hero shoplifts a horse and gallops off into the desert, but before long, pangs of love drive him back...
...Who wants to hear songs about hot-blooded killers who are sent to Death Row only so they can spend twenty years filing habeas corpus petitions before dying of old age...
...Even the criminal justice system has done its parts...
...El Paso" is the story of a lovesick Texas cowboy pushed too far by the wicked Felina, a bargirl lovely enough to stop a stampede but cursed with a fickle nature...
...The genre, which can be found in every musical category, is pure Americana, featuring love, violence, the occasional glamorous outlaw, and, almost always, the terrible swift sword of justice...
...The killing song, by contrast, is a mini-epic set to music...
...they slaughter "bitches," "hos," "niggas," those everpesky "m f 's" and anyone else who wanders into the line of fire...
...In "Banks of the Ohio," a young man whose marriage proposal is spurned takes firm action to prevent his intended from wedding another...
...A measure of social change is that one of the few recent examples of the killing song, country singer Martina McBride's "Independence Day," is about a battered wife who sets her husband on fire...
...By that point, you can bet she feels just awful about her behavior...
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...But the genre yielded more progeny in the realm of blues...
...Anyone who was around in the 1950's can recall the Kingston Trio crooning the mournful "Tom Dooley" — and we were all better off for hearing that tale about a jealous man who killed his two-timing lover and ended up involuntarily suspended from a length of rope...
...As it happened, he survived for years, but in a delicious plot twist, it was a hollow victory: Unbeknownst to the fugitive, a jury had acquitted him on grounds of self-defense...
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...The rise of humorless left-wing moralism has also been uncongenial to the art form...
...Notorious B.I.G.'s "Gimme the Loot" contains the following lines: "Nigga, you ain't got to explain s---, / I been robbing m f s since the slave ships, / With the same clip and the same fourfive, two-point blank, /Am f s sure to die...
...Gangstas don't kill lovers or romantic rivals...
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...One song was narrated by a Bad Lee Brown, who put his pistol to unauthorized use and was rewarded with a 99-year prison sentence that puzzled him no end: "Here I is, bowed down in shame,/I got a number instead of a name./ Here for de res' of my nachul life/ And all I ever done is kill my wife...
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...cost...
...For one thing, the lyrics often combine ridiculously childish rhymes with nonstop vulgarities, insulting both our intelligence and the chivalric tradition...
...It might seem especially hard to believe coming from an irony-addicted geek with beehive hair and a bachelor's degree...
...Murders in gangsta rap numbers are recounted not as cautionary tales, but as impersonal expressions of wanton sociopathy...
...Most often the killing song involved a faithless woman and a man determined to uphold his honor no matter what the STEPHEN CHAPMAN iS a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune...
...A posse couldn't find him but figured it didn't matter since he would soon be breakfast for an alligator...
...Back in the fifties, Pat Hare cut a recording of the old blues ballad "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby...
...Gangsta rap is the one modern category that features plenty of flying lead, but regrettably, it has nothing else in common with the traditional killing song...
...Some slayings, you'll be glad to know, are still socially acceptable...
...It told of a well-mannered young Jacksonville resident who stabbed a man in a fight over a woman and then fled into the great swamp to evade capture...
...County" tells of a Texan whose girlfriend moves to California accompanied by a supposedly platonic male friend from whom, a year later, she accepts a proposal of marriage...
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...Maybe that explains why "L.A...
...But significantly, in this Brady Bill era, she doesn't use a firearm...
...Going beyond the normal requirements of musicianship, he then proceeded to actually murderhis baby, a lapse for which he spent the rest of his life in the Pennsylvania state penitentiary...
...The sexual revolution, which sanctified promiscuity, rendered faintly antiquated the notion of liquidating a lover over a passing indulgence of lust...
...Country music, like folk music, produced more than its share...
...T oday killing songs are an endangered species...
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...It fell to Lyle Lovett, who veers eccentrically between country and Big Band music, to compose one of the few modern classics of the genre...
...About the only gunplay in Nashville these days is Bubba shooting the jukebox...
...Ella Fitzgerald recorded Cole Porter's "Miss Otis Regrets," in which a servant delivers the lady's message that she must decline an invitation to lunch—her unassailable excuse being that she shot her lover and shortly thereafter found her pretty neck in a noose...
...Folk music always had an inordinate fascination with sudden, intentional death...
...Simpson would have made the perfect subject of one of these ballads, if only he had ended up swinging from a gallows instead of merely swinging his five-iron on public courses...
...This decision Killing songs were once a staple of American popular culture—back when honor and justice had meaning...
...All gangsta rap has done 44 O.J...
...County" gives off the satisfying chill of authenticity...
...The 1950's and early '6o's were doubtless the golden era of the killing song, which is not unrelated to the other virtues of that period...
...58 September 19 97 • The American Spectator proves ill-advised—he runs smack into a hail of lawmen's bullets—but he doesn't expire until he reaches Felina, who embraces him tenderly as his life ebbs away...
...The happy couple, however, fails to reckon with our dogged narrator, who drives all the way from Dallas to make an appearance at the wedding, which he seriously disrupts by gunning down the bride and groom at the altar...
...Probably no one recorded more in this vein than country artist Marty Robbins, whose early sixties LP, "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs," left the landscape littered with Stetsoned corpses...
...The song has an anachronistic feel to it, which is one reason it's so enjoyable to hear...
...The reasons are not hard to guess...
...Usually, it ends badly for both of them, thus neatly validating the then-prevailing respect for sexual probity as well as social order...
...Even jazz singers got into the act...
...Most popular songs are love letters or teary lamentations...
Vol. 30 • September 1997 • No. 9
