Murder Ballads

    I love folk music. I love true crime. Combine the two together and you get the murder ballad. This is an awesome subset of folk music that tells the story of a murder or other gruesome death. Is it grisly? Yes. Is it fun? Also yes. 

    I have always been a little ghoul who enjoyed dark and strange poetry. When I was a little kid I memorized and recited Poe's The Raven between times when I was resting in my little cardboard coffin. This is likely why mom sent me to Catholic school, but that is another story.

    Murder ballads are how we try to make sense of horrible crimes by telling the story. When you can encapsulate the event into a story it creates some distance. Helps us to deal with an event that boggles the imagination. In many cases it commemorates the victim or centers on the perpetrator in order to warn us of the evil that can lurk in our daily lives. Stories are powerful because they allow us to assign meaning and context to an event. The telling of a tale puts it in our control. Those who tell the tales control the fear and horror and that makes it feel safer. 

    Our minds are narrative building machines. We have evolved this way in order to survive and make sense of a world that does not often make sense. The murder ballad is a very good example of this. Someone dies. We don't like not knowing who, what, when, where, why, and how. So we start asking questions and from the answers we create a story, a hypothesis. Except most of us don't have the access or the capability to collect, organize, and analyze the data from this event. We get scraps of information. Gossip, news, or just our own fevered imaginations. We put these disparate little bits of information together into a narrative. 

    Murder ballads are a way of dealing with trauma. They are ways of keeping information. They are absolutely fascinating.