Friday, December 17, 2010

Railroad Gin Episode 3





 Hello everyone! Thanks for checking out the written portion of the Railroad Gin video blog. I figured that I would do this as well as the video blog so i'm not blabbing forever on the video blog. Anyway. Episode Three is about Murder Ballads, specifically I talked about the song "Rose Connelly". It's a West Virginian Murder Ballad about a man who is coerced by his father to kill the woman he loves for her money. I got this song, its chords and partially its melody straight out of Alan Lomax's  "Folk Songs of North America" which is obviously something you need to own if your interested in Folk Music.

     It is a brilliant book and the book i'm always going to be referencing and using on the blog. Lomax came up with a way of studying peoples lives through the songs they gravitated towards. So for instance, you could tell a lot about the way people lived in then mountains and city's depending on what folk songs are found in their areas and what songs are being passed around. (A modern example would be like how you can judge someones IQ and their ability to spell on how much they like and how often they listen to the artist "Keh$ha". )  A fascinating thing about Murder Ballads is that they show up all over the place.

     Lomax points out that the reason that so many people gravitated towards singing and listening to these songs is because the pioneers ancestors were Indian fighters and gunslingers and all around violent people. I mean these people would go to a hanging for fun. We hear all kinds of criticisms about how people in our generation are being desensitized to violence due to TV, movies and videogames, but were not going to an actual hanging to watch someone die publicly. The point is, violence was just part of their way of life. Lomax talks about the law in West Virginia and the backwoods and how the clans and large family groups really had more power than the law. A lot of the murder ballads involve violence towards women, Lomax discusses how one would be hard pressed to find a jury that would convict a man of killing his wife if there was proof that she had been with another man.

That kind of cruelty towards women and just the overall violence that was around in the old South and West is exemplified in this story about Mike Fink.

     Mike Fink was known as the "Bully of the western rivers" nicknamed 'Snapping turtle of the Ohio' he was a ferocious pioneer man. One day he caught his wife looking at another man on a boat and so he decided that he was going to teach her a lesson. So one autumn day, Mike raked a bunch of dry leaves together and made a bed of orange and brown out of them. He called to his wife Peg and giver her the blackest glance he could muster he told her to lay down on the pile of leaves or he would shoot her between the eyes. Peg obliged and climbed onto the bed of dry leaves. Mike then proceeded to light fire to the pile in four places, and began to watch, amused, as a wind quickly lit the entire bed afire. Peg stayed in the fire bed as long as she could, until she made a run for water, her hair and clothes all caught up in flames. When she put herself out, Mike walked over and said "That'll larn ye not to be winkin' at them fellers on t'other boat.'

Yea, this kind of stuff actually happened though.
Enjoy Rose Connelly!

And check out the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds version of "The Willow Garden"