Timeless stories of American life, ours for a song

Ezra POUND defined an epic as “a poem containing history.” By that measure, a ballad might be a poem containing what history tends to leave out: local catastrophes, concealed crimes, unsubstantiated yet stubbornly persistent rumors, unreconcilable differences, irreparable defeats. In “The Rose & the Briar,” editors Sean Wilentz, a historian strongly interested in music, and Greil Marcus, a music writer adept at visionary history, asked writers, musicians and artists to meditate on the swampy borderland where ballad and history interpenetrate.

The ballads chosen are American, which is to say they have come from everywhere. Among them are a core group of early European transplants -- “Barbara Allen,” “Pretty Polly,” “The Foggy, Foggy Dew” -- that paradoxically have come to embody the deeper, darker recesses of the American character. Added to these are elements as disparate as a lost Buddy Bolden improvisation, a Jan-and-Dean hit from the mid-1960s, a mariachi lament, an early Dolly Parton tune and Duke Ellington’s sublime recording of “Come Sunday” with Mahalia Jackson. A curious mix -- just how curious is best determined by listening to the accompanying CD straight through -- but then mixing is the idea. The contributors offer variously historical investigation, shamanistic trance-journey, memoir, novella and cartoon. Happily, the alchemy succeeds: Rather than being an random assortment, “The Rose & the Briar” can be read as a book full of internal echoes and provocative coincidences.

The pieces work together like overlapping maps, with the understanding that there can be no definitive linkage in a genre where disconnection in one form or another -- murder, flight, exile, abandonment -- is the norm. The ballads are seen as messages of overwhelming urgency partially garbled in transmission. Who sent them, and from where? The writers tend to agree that those gaps in the message convey the most: “In murder ballads,” notes Rennie Sparks, “the magic is in the mystery, the parts left unsaid.” In his mesmerizing account of the origins of “Frankie and Johnny,” Cecil Brown writes: “With a kind of genius particular to this type of ballad, the scene we see -- the hospital, the doctor, the dying patient, the corpse -- goes far beyond the few words ... used.”

Faced with the austerity inherent in song, the writers reach for any ancillary detail to pry open the worlds hidden in the lyrics: clothes, for instance, as when Sharyn McCrumb details 18th century farm wife attire (“ankle-length green gown of linsey-woolsey, white starched cap and apron, and a brown wool cape”), Joyce Carol Oates talks of “a deerskin vest like a mountain man, and a belt with a brass buckle lined up neat with the buttons of his shirt, military style,” or Paul Berman describes a “brocaded sombrero, silk tie, pistol, guitar, and spurs.” They try to make connections with what is irrevocably lost, whether by combing through old newspapers to find the official accounts of the murder of Delia Green, reconstructing family history to catch a refracted glimpse of the cowboy era or letting it rip as Sparks does in a bravura soliloquy that relates “Pretty Polly” to Mesopotamian goddesses, witches drunk on mandrake root, the desperate deeds of Wild Bill Hickock and mass murderer Richard Speck, the extermination of the carrier pigeon and visions of Russian spiritualist Madame Blavatsky.

The ballad is an irrational form of history-writing -- one favoring hallucination and prophecy over logic and procedural decorum -- and provides a direct path into the chaos of history. If the official story tells what “really” happened -- a consensus version untrue to any individual experience -- the ballad tells what it felt like. The means by which ballads are transmitted can be imagined as a secret channel bypassing external obstacles, a communique from a dying voice. McCrumb envisions an astral plane where ballad characters come to fitful, constantly mutating life, sustained by a succession of singers conveying “the pain from so many muted voices.”

In that process, names and costumes change, soldiers become cowboys, demon lovers become backwoods murderers. Any song becomes a train hurtling through history, picking up an ever-expanding band of unticketed passengers along the way. We find ourselves contemplating John Wilkes Booth as he stalks President Lincoln, an Edward Hopper painting of a room in Brooklyn, the 1913 lynching of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, the 1955 murder of black teenager Emmett Till, John Wayne listening to ominous mariachi music in “Rio Bravo” or Yakutsk musicians in Siberia who in the late 1980s “became obsessed with the music of Pink Floyd.” For James Miller, Marty Robbins’ gunfighter ballad “El Paso” recalls how the killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate terrorized his hometown of Lincoln, Neb., and for Sparks “Pretty Polly” evokes “the man in the black raincoat who tried to lure me into his car with a lollipop when I was six years old.” To engage with any ballad is to initiate an open-ended, often terrifying process. Ballads refuse to be mere songs, ornaments, lullabies; they insist on dragging a real and bloody world along with them.

In Brown’s brief history of “Frankie and Johnny” -- originally “Frankie and Albert” -- we get as close as possible to the line where history meets ballad. Frankie Baker shot Allen Britt early in the morning of Oct. 16, 1899, in St. Louis: “The shooting occurred,” according to the St. Louis Republic, “at the woman’s home at 317 Targee Street, after a quarrel over another woman named Nellie Bly.” There is a first-hand description of Frankie as “a beautiful, light-brown girl, who liked to make money and spend it. She dressed very richly, sat for company in magenta lady’s cloth, diamonds as big as a hen’s eggs in her ears.... She was queen sport.” The ballad, which apparently was written within hours of the event (probably by Bill Dooley, who may also have written “Stagolee”) has mutated into 291 known versions, in which Frankie, who had originally sought “Albert” in “de whore-house,” looks for her cheating lover “in a bar, the barroom, the city bar, the saloon, the first saloon, the next saloon, the town saloon, the gin well, the beer shop, the station, on Broadway, at ‘Sweeny’s,’ at ‘the Thalia.’ ”

In the cleaned-up versions that gradually became pervasive -- even Guy Lombardo scored a hit with it in the 1940s -- Frankie looks for him at the drugstore. Meanwhile, Frankie Baker sued Republic Pictures, unsuccessfully demanding compensation for its adaptation of her life into the Helen Morgan vehicle, “Frankie and Johnny”; at the time Baker died, after being confined in a mental hospital in the 1950s, schoolchildren across America could hum the tune found in most collections of favorite American songs. It was still on jukeboxes in the 1960s, courtesy of Sam Cooke.

There is a great deal of entertaining minutiae here, but what’s striking about “The Rose & the Briar” is how it hangs together. The voices are unmistakably distinct but they share a common ground. Marcus, in an afterword, tells how his life was changed by watching a 1950s quiz show contestant launch into an a-capella rendition of “The Streets of Laredo”: “Because of her age, or her demeanor, she got it across that, somehow, the story the song was telling was more important than whether she won the money.” *