The Enduring Appeal of Country Music’s Murder Ballads

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Growing up, we lived a ways out in the country and never had any unplanned trick-or-treaters. But my aunt and uncle would bring my young cousins, and we would exclaim over their costumes then load them up with candy. It wasn’t a bad tradition, and as a teenager, I looked forward to seeing them. One year, we flung open the door to find my uncle smiling.

“You went all out for us this year,” he said. We must have appeared puzzled because he continued. “That man with a chainsaw is really realistic.”

My father went to investigate, and sure enough, there was a man standing at the end of our dark, gravel driveway with a chainsaw. He explained that his truck had broken down, and ours was the first driveway he’d passed. He was trying to flag down a ride. And the chainsaw? Well, he couldn’t rightly leave such a valuable possession in his truck for somebody to steal. 

My dad must have thought that was a reasonable explanation because he invited the man inside to use our phone—as long as he left his belongings on the porch. If this were a Flannery O’Connor short story, that would have been the end of us. Instead, he was a nice enough older gentleman who called somebody then declined when we offered to let him wait in our kitchen. I suspect that he didn’t want to leave his chainsaw unattended for too long.

If I were going to write a country song, this would be my inspiration. It has all the ingredients: pickup trucks, gravel roads, and a hint of danger. After living away from Tennessee for more two decades, I recently moved back and started to appreciate some of the details I took for granted as a kid. The neighbor’s saucer magnolia is so vibrant right now that my toddler exclaims “pink!” every time we go outside. The rhythm of the language is coming back to me, the reckons and the fixin’ tos. At my favorite meat-and-three place, you can order fried catfish, fried okra, and fried potatoes without the waitress batting an eye. “You wanna sweet tea with that,” she’ll respond, grabbing the pen from behind her ear. And—most surprisingly to me since I avoided the genre as a too-cool-for-school teen—I’ve started to enjoy country music.

To be fair, I’ve long appreciated the grandes dames of the genre. For my 30th birthday, I saw Dolly Parton at the Thompson-Bowling Arena in Knoxville and still have the ticket stub as proof. In 2008, I saw Emmylou Harris with Shawn Colvin and Patty Griffin at The Beacon Theater in New York City. And I had tickets to see Loretta Lynn at the Ryman in Nashville before her final tour was canceled. But putting on a radio station with a nickname along the lines of The Possum or Hill Country? That’s a new habit. 

I like the twangy fiddles, toe-tapping beats, and unexpected lyrics. There’s a self-aware sense of humor that I completely missed in my younger days. The first time I heard a song called “Red Solo Cup,” I thought the DJs were messing around, making something up on the spot. “Hey, red solo cup is cheap and disposable,” sings Toby Keith. “And in fourteen years, they are decomposable / And unlike my home, they are not foreclosable.” My poet friends and I would be hard-pressed to find better rhymes. The stanza concludes with a pretty classic country music move: a middle finger to “the man.” In this case, “the man” is mortgage lender Freddy Mac.

Another trend I’ve noticed—and enjoy more than the odes to drinking—is the proliferation of murder ballads. The ballad is poetic style dating back hundreds of years, and it’s easy to understand the form’s appeal. The four-line, rhymed stanzas are memorable (important for an originally oral tradition), and the stories are dramatic. Crime remains a popular subject. If you were strolling the streets of London in the seventeenth century, you might be handed a broadside about the Twa sisters, learning how the older sister drowned the younger in an act of jealousy. When the dead girl washes ashore, somebody makes an instrument out of her bones—or her garments, depending on the version—and that instrument sings about the killing. It doesn’t get much more macabre than that. 

If you tune your radio to a country station today, you might learn about a man driving to his ex-girlfriend’s wedding with “an old friend at his side,” aka his Colt .45. “L.A. County” is not Lyle Lovett’s biggest hit off his 1987 album Pontiac, but it’s the only one with a gruesome double murder told to a tune so jaunty that you’ll find yourself drumming on the steering wheel and humming along. 

A more famous murder ballad example might be “Goodbye Earl” by The Chicks in which best friends conspire to kill an abusive husband. Poisoned black-eyed peas do the trick, and the cops never suspect a thing. Or, as Dennis Linde wrote for the performers, “turns out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all.” The video emphasizes the narrative strengths of this song by casting the story with Jane Krakowski and Dennis Franz. But if you’re imagining a dark tearjerker, let me assure you that there’s more humor than horror, complete with a dancing zombie version of Earl. 

An example with a similar plot but a less jubilant tone is Hardy’s “Wait in the Truck.” In this story, a stranger stumbles across a woman who’s been beaten up. He tells her to wait in his truck then he knocks down her door and shoots her abuser. The song ends with the “hero” serving 60 years in prison without any regrets. The woman gets her own lines (sung by Lainey Wilson), and she expresses her gratitude as well as her surprise: “I never thought my day of justice / would come from a judge under a seat.” Like Lovett’s gun being his friend, this one is both judge and jury.

What is it about murder ballads that appeal to country music songwriters, performers, and fans? Is there a fantasy element involved perhaps? Often the victims in these songs are despicable, so it’s satisfying to hear about them getting their comeuppance. Revenge for domestic abuse is a common theme. Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” recounts a woman burning down her own home to escape her abusive husband. The music sounds so celebratory that it’s been used by at least one high-profile politician as an anthem at campaign events despite of—or perhaps in ignorance of—its meaning. But plenty of other songs feature crimes of passion, including Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” in which a woman burns down her ex’s house, not because of abuse but because of rejection. Then there’s Charley Pride’s 1968 “Banks of the Ohio” in which a man kills his girlfriend for breaking up with him. 

Willie Nelson has an entire concept album about a killer, Red Headed Stranger. Perhaps because the story spans multiple songs, it is more nuanced than the one-off hits. The protagonist kills his wife and her lover then flees from the police, eventually coming to regret his actions. While the story itself is outlandish—at one point the stranger kills another woman for trying to grab his horse—there’s memorable reflection, particularly in “Hands on the Wheel.” Songwriter William Callery categorizes people as “deceivers and believers and old in-betweeners,” a nod to the gray areas of morality.

My favorite example of the country music murder ballad is “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” which also boasts a more complex conclusion, good guys (and gals) blurring with the bad ones. It was written by Bobby Russell and recorded by his wife Vicki Lawrence, but I am more familiar with Reba McEntire’s 1991 cover. A man discovers that his wife’s been cheating on him, but when he goes to confront the couple, he finds them dead. The cops arrest him for the murder, and he’s executed for a crime he didn’t commit. This song comes complete with a blockbuster-worthy twist: the killer is the hanged man’s sister. 

I live in Knoxville now, not the backwoods town of my youth, but my yard still feels a little wild. We have foxes, squirrels, and most recently a groundhog. I’m waiting for the snakes to slither out as the temperature warms. But when we go out at night and my dog growls at something under the porch, my mind starts to overreact, wondering if it’s not a critter but perhaps a trespasser that’s raised her hackles. Does this sense of danger arise from feeling removed from civilization? Being too far from others to cry for help? We see it in Southern crime fiction, as well. The remote setting where cell phone reception is spotty, and gossips will talk about so-and-so’s new boyfriend but never reveal where the bodies are buried. Where locals prefer to handle problems themselves, and it seems like just about every character has their granddaddy’s old 20-gauge shotgun. Murder ballads—at least as they are reimagined in country music—often tap into a fantasy of independence, a world where vigilantes can dole out justice and rarely face the firing squad. Rugged individualism with a violent streak. 

But ultimately I’d argue that the enduring appeal of the murder ballad in country music is similar to the enduring appeal of crime novels. They make a good story. Moreover, the stakes couldn’t be higher in art about life-and-death circumstances. Mysteries and thrillers start with the volume dialed up to ten. They provide insight into character, what people do in the worst circumstances. They reflect what we know about ourselves—and what we don’t want to know.

It’s no coincidence that I’m sipping out of my Square Books coffee mug today, ruminating over the Flannery O’Connor quotation on the back: “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Could the same be said for country music’s biggest stars? They recognize that dark and light impulses exist in all us simultaneously, so why not sing about them.

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