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Robbers, Bridegrooms, etc...

The Robber Bridegroom's songs reflect a variety of American folk traditions with roots in Western Europe and Africa.

The Grimm Brothers' original fairy story is a bloody affair. A thief poses as a nobleman and cons a gullible miller out of his daughter's hand in marriage. Druggings, poisonings, and severings are capped by an execution. Neat, right? And not far removed from all the gothically-bent ballads about lost love and murder that inform modern Country and Bluegrass.

The Louvin Brothers gore-spattered "Knoxville Girl" is derived from a 19th Century Irish Ballad called "The Wexford Girl" which was also a reworking of an even older English song originally called "The Bloody Miller," which spawned a number of clones and copycats including "The Berkshire Tragedy." Here's a nice mashup of these versions, a dead ringer for the Louvin classic, but a little more gruesome.

The Bloody Miller (c. 1685) /

The Berkshire Tragedy (1744)

“By chance upon an Oxford lass,		}
I cast a wanton eye,		}B
And promised I would marry her		}T
If she with me would lie.		}
“Thus I deluded her again,		}
Into a private place,		}B
Then took a stick out of the hedge,		}T
And struck her in the face.		}

“But she fell on bended knee,		}
For mercy she did cry,		}B
‘For heaven's sake don't murder me,		}T
I am not fit to die’		}
“From ear to ear I slit her mouth,		}
And stabbed her in the head,		}B
Till she poor soul did breathless lie,		}M
Before her butcher bled.		}

If you really want to geek out there's a nicely detailed history here.

Some other examples of love gone weird and deadly include The Stanley Brothers "Little Glass of Wine" and "In the Pines," a standard of blues and bluegrass about lost honor and decapitation with numerous variations including one that tells of a Georgia girl who runs and hides among the pines after being raped by a soldier. Uplifting, no?

Also of note, "King Kong Kitchie Ki-Me-O" tells the story of an amorous frog that kills several other woodland creatures with a sword and pistol because they're trying to make time with his girl, Ms. Mouse.

For fun (and since this is a Halloween show more or less): As American music evolved so did songs about sex and violence. Examples include Cocaine Blues (which was based on an old ballad called "Little Sadie" and got several treatments) a honky tonk take on Psycho, and Johnny Paycheck's polite, totally over the top double-murder/suicide song, "Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill."

When I did this show at Rhodes in 1988 playwright Alfred Uhry called to leave the cast an opening night greeting. "Don't put any straw in your teeth," he said, advising us to play things straight. Great advice, obviously but doubletalk coming from the man who wrote the groaner gag, "Sorry brother, I lost my head." No matter how straight you play it, there are elements of hayseed comedy that simply won't be ignored. Here's a great bit by Flash & Whistler.

"Nothing Up" reminds me of nothing more than "Life Gets Tedious, Don't it?" a spoken word piece by June Carter.

And here's Uncle Dave Macon preparing possum to eat.

In 1988 The entire cast broke out spoons and played them during "Goodbye Salome." "Marriage is Riches" calls for handclaps and banging on the set. There are so many great traditions of personal percussion but none more fun and foolish than the art of "eefing," a kind of early rural beatboxing which was often combined with the Hambone. Learn all about it here. Take a lesson from master eefer Jimmy Riddle here.

And if you can't eef, you can always slap yourself in the face like Cousin Emmy

Some thoughts about the banjo. Today the blues is so closely associated with the guitar there's a general assumption that it's the form's primary instrument. But guitar-driven blues is a rather late development, really. It starts with the banjo, which sometimes took the place of forbidden drums, as a tool for wordless communication among slaves. Here are The Carolina Chocolate Drops, great African-American string band revivalists.

Banjo picker Dock Boggs who blended country blues with old time mountain music is widely regarded as a seminal figure in the evolution of American music.

This next clip is a Flipumentary I shot at the "Old Time Bannjo Summit," part of the 2010 Folk Alliance conference held in Downtown Memphis. It features three players with distinctly different kinds of banjos playing dance, trance, and warning tunes.

The fiddle sounds in bluegrass and country music descend from Celtic jigs and reels that evolved in the shadow of Clinch Mountain and French folk music that poured out of the Louisiana swamps.

Uncle Jimmy Thompson--the Grand Old Opry's original star-- was born in the 1848 and his approach to the fiddle reflects pre-Civil War playing styles.

And some more fine examples of string band music.

And my favorite

Bill and Belle Reed's "Old Lady & the Devil" always reminds me of Salome.

And nothing says Goodbye Salome like Clara Ward's "Packing Up."

I'll end this post with "Kaw-Liga." The native Americans in Eudora Welty's version of The Robber Bridegroom didn't make it into the musical, but certain easily identifiable sonic tropes did. "Kitchen Girl," in particular follows an Indian-influenced tradition in American folk and country music.

UPDATE: Thought I might add a little side note about The Bristol sessions and the big bang of recorded Americana. It started in Bristol, Tennessee when Okeh talent scout Ralph Peer, convinced there was a market for rural American music, assembled a crude recording studio there and promised to pay the musicians he recorded. The big stars to emerge from those sessions were The Carter Family

and Jimmy Rogers.

I'm updating this post to include a bizarre Memphis twist. In Forest Hill Cemetery you'll find the grave of John R. Brinkly, a quack doctor who made a fortune selling snake oil remedies and performing a special surgery for fellows in need of--um--natural male enhancement. He'd surgically implant the testicles of a goat in men who thought they might be lacking down there. He advertised his killer cures on the radio and eventually started his own stations specifically to advertise his medicines and procedures. National broadcast regulation was enacted almost specifically to curb Brinkley. Eventually, he created mega-stations just over the border in Mexico and these stations broadcast the likes of Rodgers and the Carter Family across America and Mexico and into Canada.

Although phonograph records sold well enough the boarder blaster stations made what we now call country and western music a national and international sensation.