This week on Inside Appalachia, we’re talking about traditional ballads – how they tell stories and connect us to the past. These old tunes can mean so much. They can tap into difficult emotions and give feelings space to be heard. Some songs may even be too uncomfortable to sing.
This week on Inside Appalachia, we’re talking about traditional ballads – how they tell stories and connect us to the past.
These old tunes can mean so much. They can tap into difficult emotions and give feelings space to be heard. Some songs may even be too uncomfortable to sing.
In this special episode with guest co-host, ballad singer Saro Lynch-Thomason, we explore songs about lawbreaking folk heroes, runaway trains and murder ballads.
All the stories in this episode are produced as part of our Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
We’ve recorded more than 150 stories for this project, and you can find them all here.
The Ballad Of ‘John Henry’ Elicits Varied Feelings For Some Black Appalachian Residents
The ballad of “John Henry” tells the story of a railroad worker who competes against a steam drill to see who can drill a hole through a mountain fastest and farthest. With his immense strength and skill, John Henry wins, but dies from his efforts. There is great debate about the historical facts, but most accounts describe Henry as an African American man from West Virginia or Virginia, working for the C&O Railroad. For some who grew up in Black communities in Appalachia, the song elicits a variety of feelings. Folkways Reporter Nicole Musgrave has more.
If learning about John Henry piqued your interest, be sure to check out the recent Black in Appalachia podcast episode about John Henry. They dive into some important topics, including a current-day link between health and working conditions, especially for Black workers.
Ballads About Train Wrecks Holds Lessons For Modern Life
Starting in the late 19th century, trains were everywhere in southern Appalachia, and so were songs about them. Scott Huffard, an associate professor of History at Lees-McCrae College, says these ballads weren’t just about trains, they were emulating trains using special techniques with common instruments. Reporter Laura Harbert Allen has that story and tells us what we can learn from ballads about trains.
Traditional Murder Ballads Reveal A Dark Truth About “True Crime” Media
There are many murder ballads from Appalachia – and most of them are about men killing women. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold is a musician himself. In fact, you can hear him playing guitar and banjo on a song called “Little Sadie” that appears in this week’s episode.
“Little Sadie” is a ballad about a man killing his sweetheart – exactly the kind of song Zack sought to understand in his reporting about murder ballads. What can they tell us about history? And what is “true crime” the modern-day equivalent?
Real-Life Outlaw Otto Wood Went Viral In The Thirties
As Zack explored in his story, people in the past and the present love viral “true crime” stories. In the early 1930s, the way for a story to go “viral” was by being sung about in a ballad. That’s what happened to Otto Wood, a real-life outlaw who grew up around Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia, became a famous moonshiner, and died in a shootout with police in 1930. Less than one year later, his story was told in the ballad “Otto Wood The Bandit,” recorded by Walker Kid and the Carolina Buddies.
Our host Mason Adams reported on that song.
——
Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Wes Swing, Dinosaur Burps, and The Chamber Brothers. Roxy Todd produced this episode. Bill Lynch is our producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Alex Runyon was our associate producer. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
The back-to-back horrific McDowell County floods of 2001 and 2002 were widely reported by print, radio and TV, but these outlets could not tell the story and bring healing like Alan Cathead Johnston’s ballad, Muddy Water, with healing effects that still endure.
“It was on a Sunday morning, on the 8th day of July
In the year of 2001
Way down in McDowell County, in the West Virginia hills
This story originally aired in the July 30, 2023 episode of Inside Appalachia.
In the little town of Kimball, on the banks of the Elkhorn Creek, Markella Gianato is making french fries at her Greek-American restaurant called the Ya’Sou. Kimball is in McDowell County, the southernmost county in West Virginia.
Back in the summer of 2001, Markella saw buildings and debris washed away in a horrific flood. People said it was a once-in-a-hundred-year flood, but it wasn’t. Less than a year later, an equally devastating flood tore through the county. This time, Markella, felt the heartbreak of witnessing a futile effort to save a mother and child from floodwaters. “I have had to have treatment for PTSD and so forth,” she said.
She says part of her healing has also come from a song — a ballad about the floods called “Muddy Water.”
“At first, it was very hard for me to hear it,” she said. “I could not talk about it at first. Now, it seems like it’s just part of my heart. Every phrase of that song is so real.”
Gianato uses the ballad story to tell her story when she talks to SWAP volunteer mission groups who come to the county to do repair work in the summers. She opened her PowerPoint presentation, and looking at a photo said, “That’s Richard Jones; that’s the guy who rescued my dad.”
In the background audio, Alan Johnston and his daughter’s voice sing the ballad. Johnston wrote “Muddy Water” in the summer of 2002. As Gianato looks at the slide show, Johnston sings, “we wondered if it was ever gonna end.”
“That part touches me,” Gianato said, and she remembers how rising waters forced her to retreat with her family to the upstairs apartment of her father’s grocery store, where she found her 13-year-old son attaching an empty milk jug to her father’s waist.
“Lightning flashed around us, and the thunder shook the ground, and we wondered if it was ever gonna end,” — these lyrics of Muddy Water described the anxiety of those like Gianato’s family, who were trapped in the brick building (right), surrounded by at least 7 feet of water.
Courtesy Markella Gianato
“And I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘My papoo might not remember how to swim. But if something happens and the rescue gets botched, or the building doesn’t stay under us, he’ll float and they’ll find him.’ He put a belt through the handle of that milk jug and around my daddy’s chest. That rascal had thought that far ahead,” Gianato said.
After waters receded, rescuers reached them with an endloader.
“I call the PowerPoint presentation ‘Forever Changed,’” Gianato said, “because it changed my life, changed our town, but mostly it changed me.”
Centered on the restaurant’s wall of historical family photos and news articles, is the photo of the flooded building.
Credit: Connie Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
New Dreams And Old Friends
Reflecting on the ballad lyric, “From Keystone down to Landgraf, and from Kimball into Welch, Muddy Water washed away our hopes and dreams.” Gianato said she sees two sides of those ballad words now. “It washes your hopes and dreams away but they come back to you sometimes. It may be different,” she said.
And that “different” for her is the restaurant she now operates. It’s not the original grocery store her father had operated since 1947, and it’s not her dream of the sandwich shop she’d planned, which washed away in the 2002 flood. But the dream that emerged instead was this Ya’Sou Restaurant and West Virginia Grocery. She’s still honoring the spot where her immigrant father started his dream, and the people of Kimball have a place to gather and hear live music on the weekends.
Alan Johnston performed Muddy Water at the Ya’Sou numerous times before the COVID-19 shutdowns. Gianato and Johnston are friends who have known each other since high school and they have lived through at least six major county floods in their lifetimes.
The Ya’Sou, nicknamed “The Breadbasket of Kimball” on signage, was formerly A.P. Wood Grocery Store.
Credit: Connie Kitts/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Johnston will still occasionally drop into the Ya’Sou for a burger. Many know him by his nickname of “Cathead” because of the cathead biscuits he loves to eat. He’s lived in McDowell County his whole life. He’s worked at everything from school teaching to furnace repair to grocery store management and juke box repair. He’s photographed his county end-to-end, and has written ballads about its range of characters, including John Hardy the gambler, Sid Hatfield the sheriff, and Homer Hickam the NASA scientist. He combines his passion for history, photography and music on his YouTube channel.
Don Rigsby, national bluegrass artist of eastern Kentucky, considers Johnston one of West Virginia’s finest songwriters.
“He equated the muddy water to having its own soul, its own personality and goals, instead of it just being a form of matter that we can’t create or destroy,” said Rigsby. “He gave it power beyond just being water in the river. He gave it life and character. And that’s very, very clever writing.”
Rigsby said Johnston is all about the feeling in a song first. “The old blues guys from back in the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s were the same way,” he said.
Rigsby recorded his version of Muddy Water with the iconic Vassar Clements on fiddle and Kenny Malone on percussion. “You can hear the fiddle making the devil-laughter up there, if you listen,” said Rigsby. “It’s one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever recorded,” he said.
He added that it’s also a legacy piece for him, as both Clements and Malone have passed away. And it’s special for Johnston, as Clements is his favorite fiddler.
Music Is In The Genes
Johnston grew up on Premier Mountain, just west of Welch, the county seat. He still lives there. Music is in his genes. When he was about 5 years old, he sang the coal mining ballad “Sixteen Tons” in the grocery store.
“So they put me up on the meat case there and I’d sing it,” he said. “I must have been a sight,” he said.
Johnston’s grandmother played the clawhammer banjo and passed that down to Johnston’s father, a coal miner and prize-winning fiddle player.
Alan Johnston’s grandmother, Clara Blankenship Johnston on banjo, Druey Mitchem on fiddle, and father Raymond Johnston on accordion, in Carswell Holler in 1953.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
“Daddy, he was awesome on clawhammer banjo and the fiddle, and he played guitar very well,” Johnston said.
“So every night when I came home from school, after I got my homework done and everything, it was just play music, play music. Every night. And then he would give me a pointer or two. He’d say, ‘Do that like this, do that like this.’” Johnston said.
Raymond Johnston (left) on fiddle, and Alan on guitar. Alan taught himself banjo first, and he received his first guitar one Christmas.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
Musical Talent Passes Down
Johnston specializes in upright acoustic bass and guitar but he can also play mandolin, fiddle, banjo, electric guitar and keyboards. And perhaps any other instrument put in his hands. He’s the one playing all the instruments in the mix of Muddy Water. And he also sang.
“I’m not much of a singer,” he says. “I come up short on that end, but my daughters are fantastic singers.”
The voices of both Jessi Shumate and Stacy Grubb are familiar to many in McDowell County and Johnston recorded a version of Muddy Water with each daughter.
Jessi Shumate and Stacy Grubb, accompanied by Alan Johnston.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
When Muddy Water played on the radio, shortly after the floods, it became the most requested song at WELC, the Welch, West Virginia AM radio station.
People wanted CDs of the song. Johnston thought he would mimic the old 45 rpm record singles. “And there was two songs on it. And front and back, you know, A side, B side. And I thought, well, that’s what I’ll do,” Johnston said. So he put two songs on a CD disk and made 50 copies, using his own home studio, printer and supplies. He took them with him to work.
“And before I could clock in, the 50 were gone and when I came to work the next day, people were outside waiting to get one,” he said.
He said he had to charge something to recoup the cost of supplies, so he sold them for $3 a piece. “I ended up selling over 5,000 of them,” he said.
The ballad was given out on CDs at class reunions, covered by national artists — including bluegrass performer Don Rigsby and David Davis — and it was often played at festivals and flood reunions.
Muddy Water was often one of the first requested songs at festivals, Johnston said. He plays here with Charlie Davis and Johnny Prevento at the Asco Hollow Reunion.
Courtesy Alan Johnston
Ballad Says What People Could Not Say
It’s the recording that still circulates on the internet that Cynthia Cox remembers hearing. Cox grew up in Northfork Hollow, about 10 miles east of Kimball. Her home was severely damaged in the floods and they made the hard decision of moving about 15 miles south to Bluewell, West Virginia, in neighboring Mercer County.
She’s still deeply moved by Muddy Water.
“Even driving in the county now, I still think at times that happened yesterday,” she said as she listened to the song on her smartphone. “The people stay with you and the song stays with you.”
Cox listens to and loves all kinds of music. “Growing up, McDowell County music was a part of your life to survive. And the musical love in my generation was because of our parents and our grandparents. Also music in church. It was a coping skill,” she said.
She loves the instrumentation in the beginning of the song. “Just hearing the rift of the music in itself draws you in. And then when you listen to the lyrics, yes, it offered comfort that we couldn’t speak,” she said.
The song lyrics also expressed the anger people felt, Cox said.
“Some people blamed the coal mines and the timber industry.
They called it the 100 year flood.“
“The anger toward the timber and coal mining was real. And he spoke it when he sang it. He could say what we couldn’t say,” she said.
What she hears in the song is a common language of empathy and struggle. “He put the community in the lyrics,” she said. “You know, the news articles tried to capture it, the photographs back then tried to capture it. But you don’t really hear it and feel the story, too, until you hear him sing Muddy Water,” Cox said.
Second Flood Brings More Suffering And Lessons
“But less than 10 months later, on the second day of May
The thunder clapped and rain began to fall.
And we ate the words that we had spoken way back in July
Muddy Water you made liars of us all.“
Johnston’s lyrics capture the unbelief people felt when the second 100-year flood came 10 months later. “If you would’ve told anyone at that time, there’s a flood coming tomorrow, and it’s gonna wash it all away, we’d called them a liar,” Cox said. “Like, are you just crazy? You’re talking nonsense, but it became a reality,” she said.
“Well we worked so hard to put back
What you took away before, just to have you come and take it all again
Ten thousand people cried, seven people died
And I could hear the devil laughin’ in the wind.“
Cox said she now lives with a faith that accepts that disasters may come. “We’re not invincible from any kind of natural disaster. You don’t think, ‘I might face a train derailment of toxic chemicals’ like the East Palestine train derailment, until the things happen.”
Music can give a sense of community even when devastation and natural disasters destroy it, Cox said. “So you need music. You need healthy outlets.”
“The therapy that comes from his music helped us to grieve, which gave us strength so we could rebuild and regather to like, okay, we’re either gonna stay down here or we’re gonna have to move. I commend those who were able to stay, and at times I envy that because once your county, that’s always home.”
Johnston said someone once told him he lived in a cool place. “The man said, ‘Everybody writes songs about where you live, you know, in Appalachia. Nobody has ever written a song about where I live,’” Johnston said he thought about that a while. “And I thought, it is a cool place to live. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
——
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
This week on Inside Appalachia, we’re talking about traditional ballads — how they tell stories and connect us to the past. These old tunes can mean so much. They can tap into difficult emotions and give feelings space to be heard. Some songs may even be too uncomfortable to sing.
This week on Inside Appalachia, we’re talking about traditional ballads — how they tell stories and connect us to the past.
These old tunes can mean so much. They can tap into difficult emotions and give feelings space to be heard. Some songs may even be too uncomfortable to sing. In this special episode with guest co-host, ballad singer Saro Lynch-Thomason, we explore songs about lawbreaking folk heroes, runaway trains and murder ballads.
All the stories in this episode are produced as part of our Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. We’ve recorded more than ninety stories for this project, and you can find them all here.
The Ballad Of ‘John Henry’ Elicits Varied Feelings For Some Black Appalachian Residents
The ballad of “John Henry” tells the story of a railroad worker who competes against a steam drill to see who can drill a hole through a mountain fastest and farthest. With his immense strength and skill, John Henry wins, but dies from his efforts. There is great debate about the historical facts, but most accounts describe Henry as an African American man from West Virginia or Virginia, working for the C&O Railroad. For some who grew up in Black communities in Appalachia, the song elicits a variety of feelings. Folkways Reporter Nicole Musgrave has more.
If learning about John Henry piqued your interest, be sure to check out the recent Black in Appalachia podcast episode about John Henry. They dive into some important topics, including a current-day link between health and working conditions, especially for Black workers.
Ballads About Train Wrecks Hold Lessons For Modern Life
Starting in the late nineteenth century, trains were everywhere in southern Appalachia, and so were songs about them. Scott Huffard, an associate professor of History at Lees-McCrae College, says these ballads weren’t just about trains, they were emulating trains using special techniques with common instruments. Reporter Laura Harbert Allen has that story, and tells us what we can learn from ballads about trains.
Traditional Murder Ballads Reveal A Dark Truth About “True Crime” Media
There are many murder ballads from Appalachia — and most of them are about men killing women. Folkways Reporter Zack Harold is a musician himself. In fact, you can hear him playing guitar and banjo on a song called “Little Sadie” that appears in this week’s episode. “Little Sadie” is a ballad about a man killing his sweetheart — exactly the kind of song Zack sought to understand in his reporting about murder ballads. What can they tell us about history? And what is the modern day equivalent of “true crime?”
Real-Life Outlaw Otto Wood Went Viral In The Thirties
In the early 1930s, the way for a story to go “viral” was by being sung about in a ballad. That’s what happened to Otto Wood, a real-life outlaw who grew up around Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia, became a famous moonshiner, and died in a shootout with police in 1930. Less than one year later, his story was told in the ballad “Otto Wood The Bandit,” recorded by Walker Kid and the Carolina Buddies. Our host Mason Adams reported on that song.
——
Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Wes Swing, Dinosaur Burps, and The Chamber Brothers.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
In the early 1930s, the way for a story to go “viral” was by being sung about in a ballad. That’s what happened to Otto Wood, a real-life outlaw who grew up around Wilkesboro, North Carolina. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia, became a famous moonshiner, and died in a shootout with police in 1930. Less than one year later, his story was told in the ballad “Otto Wood The Bandit,” recorded by Walker Kid and the Carolina Buddies.
True-life outlaw Otto Wood went viral in 1931 — one year after he was killed in a fatal shoot-out with a North Carolina sheriff. How does one go viral in the 1930s? For Otto Wood, it happened partly through newspaper accounts that laid the groundwork for a massive funeral and his subsequent commemoration through a ballad that’s still played today.
Plenty of Wood’s life set him up for his eventual fame. He grew up in the hills around Wilkesboro, North Carolina and lost a hand in a childhood accident. He spent time with the Hatfields of southern West Virginia in the early 1900s, and later became a famed moonshiner.
Legend has it Wood eventually ran into trouble with the law after an incident involving a pawn shop and a family watch.
Here’s how folk icon Doc Watson told it, on his album “Legacy” with David Holt, released in 2002.
“He had pawned his grandfather’s watch, needed some money real bad,” Watson said. “And he pawned it to Mr. A.C. Kaplan, who had a pawn shop in Greensboro, North Carolina. And he promised he’d be back in a short time to redeem the watch. And he had supposedly had a 30 day grace period, according to the agreement. But he went back in about 10 days and the old boy had sold his watch. And he [Wood] was really angry, flew into a rage, and there happened to be one of those old antique pistols … He snatched it up, hit the man over the head with it a little too hard. And he was sentenced for 2nd degree murder.”Wood subsequently escaped from the Raleigh prison where he was sent. In Watson’s telling, he “whittled a gun out of a cake of soap,” jabbed it into a guard’s back and coerced him into driving him away.
But it was his shootout with a sheriff in Salisbury, North Carolina, that entrenched his name in pop culture history.
“The sheriff who had been looking for him, Sheriff Rankin, saw him walking along the street, pulled over and told him to get in the car,” said North Carolina musician Holt, who often performed with Watson. “Otto got in the car and [then ] … opened the back door, rolled out on the ground, and pulled his gun. Rankin got out the front door and shot Otto across a Model A body. Otto shot at Rankin but he missed him, just nicked his ear. And Otto got hit right in the face and died. So that’s a pretty dramatic ending.”
The local newspaper reported that as many as 20,000 people attended Wood’s funeral and filed past his casket. Locals also raised money to send his body home to his mother in Coaldale, West Virginia.
A year later, in 1931 Walker Kid Smith wrote “Otto Wood the Bandit” and recorded it with the Carolina Buddies.
The chorus goes, “Otto, why didn’t you run? / Otto’s done dead and gone / Otto Wood, why didn’t you run / When the sheriff pulled out that 44 gun?”
The single sold a couple thousand copies. But one of them landed in the hands of Doc Watson. He recorded it for his 1965 album, “Doc Watson and Son,” which hit at the height of the ‘60s folk boom. Doc Watson went on to become an icon of the folk and Americana movement over the late 20th century.
And “Otto Wood the Bandit” was emblazoned into the American songbook. Musicians have been singing about Otto Wood ever since. Like “Slim” Smith, Norman Blake, Barbara Scott and JP Harris.
West Virginia musician Chance McCoy produced and played fiddle on the Harris version. McCoy and Harris didn’t get a chance to play the tune a lot together, especially once the pandemic brought live music to a halt. But they did tour together, and McCoy got to see a crowd in Germany respond to “Otto Wood.”
“We played a house concert in an apartment in Berlin, and I can remember that people were standing on the furniture,” McCoy said. “I remember playing that song, and this room full of 200 Berliners was singing along to ‘Otto Wood.’ I don’t even know if they understood a word, but it’s a good tune.”
So, as someone who’s been playing and singing this song for years — why does Chance McCoy think Otto Wood didn’t run?
“For Otto Wood, he had to end it somewhere,” McCoy said. “It certainly wasn’t going to be spending his life in prison. I think for him, the adventure was over, and he knew it. And it was better to go out in a blaze of glory than to fizzle out in a jail cell.”
David Holt has a different answer. Why didn’t Otto Wood run?
“I think he was trying to run — just the car was too short across and they shot him right in the head,” Holt said. “He was pretty bold, you know. He felt like the people knew him. People liked him. People weren’t afraid of him. So he’s like a minor celebrity. I think actually at the end, he was trying to get away from Sheriff Rankin. It just didn’t work. He would have run one more time.”
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
There are many murder ballads from Appalachia — and most of them are about men killing women. Folkways reporter Zack Harrold is a musician himself. In fact, you can hear him playing guitar and banjo on a song called “Little Sadie” that appeared in the May 20, 2022 episode of Inside Appalachia. “Little Sadie” is a ballad about a man killing his sweetheart — exactly the kind of song Zack sought to understand in his reporting about murder ballads. What can they tell us about history? And is “true crime” the modern-day equivalent?
I got really into bluegrass when I was in college. And it didn’t take long before I ran into my very first murder ballad — “The Knoxville Girl,” as performed by Jim and Jesse McReynolds.
I’d never heard anything like it. Bleak, disturbing lyrics set to such a lively major-key melody. And as I learned more about the bluegrass canon, I kept running into more songs like this. Like “Pretty Polly” and “Katy Dear.”
The more of these songs I discovered, the more I noticed odd similarities in the stories. Almost every time, a jealous lover takes his girl out to the woods or down by the river. She, evidently sensing something is amiss, begs him not to hurt her. Then he kills her — usually with a knife.
And for some reason, the guy’s name is usually “Willie.”
After years of pondering the subject, I decided to get to the bottom of this murder ballad mystery. That’s how I ended up on the phone with Mark Charles of Louisville, Kentucky. His band Vandaveer recorded a whole album of murder ballads — called fittingly enough, “Oh Willie Please.” Having spent so much time with these songs, I wondered if Charles had gained any insights into their creepy similarities.
“Certainly you start noticing thematic similarities and overlapping details,” Charles said. “Some of that’s to be expected because so much of the ballad tradition is storytelling and passing down stories from one generation to another or from one town to another.”
Folk music, by its very nature, takes elements from old songs and transforms them into something new. Many murder ballads such as “The Knoxville Girl” have roots in the British Isles, where they were printed in broadsides — cheap pamphlets that were the 17th century version of tabloid newspapers.
For this reason, early musicologists dismissed American murder ballads as rip-offs of their English forebearers. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
According to murder ballad scholar Christina Blanton, the American tunes are trying to telegraph something very specific about 19th century white American society.
“There were absolutely warnings to women about what happens when you are not well behaved, when you fall in love with the wrong guy, when you are not abiding by the accepted moral code,” she said.
The songs were a way of reinforcing society’s standards for women. It’s no mistake the murders typically take place in the woods or by the river.
“She’s always lured away from that Appalachian town that represents codified society, a place of safety,” Blanton said.
It’s also not a mistake that the songs’ drownings evoke images of old-time river baptisms.
“After they’re dead they do finally attain that perfect feminine nature,” Blanton said.
The songs clean up their victims in other ways, too. The stories are strikingly similar and, if you pay close attention, so are the victims.
“A woman needs to be pure and good and she’s misled by this mean, mean horrible man. And this mean, mean horrible man doesn’t want the responsibility of fatherhood, in a lot of cases, or to provide financially — so he offs her,” said Madison Helman, a graduate student at West Virginia University who is currently working on a dissertation about murder ballads.
Helman has dug into old court records and newspaper reports about the crimes that inspired several famous songs. She’s found interesting disparities between what actually happened and what made it into the lyrics.
Take the ballad “Omi Wise,” for example. It’s based on a real murder in north carolina from a few hundred years. In the song, a guy named John gets Omi pregnant out of wedlock. He lures her into the woods, promising to elope, and instead drowns her in the river. Toward the end of the song, the whole town goes out to look for her body and bring John to justice.
In real life, Omi already had kids with other men, and was likely meeting with John so he would sign some paternity papers.
“And there’s not really this angelic virginal maiden who was led astray by love. It’s a woman who was doing her own thing, living her life kind of on the outskirts. And when she went missing, not that many people went looking for her,” Helman said.
It seems murder ballads only interesting in telling the stories of women who fit a particular profile. If victims didn’t fit the profile, like Omi Wise, sometimes their stories got changed. Other times, the stories don’t get told at all.
It’s something we still see in true crime podcasts, documentaries and books.
“The cases that still get the most press are a pretty white well-off blonde girl,” Helman said. “And I’m not saying they shouldn’t also get sympathy and elicit support, but there are hundreds of women who don’t fit that profile and are in that same situation, and we don’t hear about it.
“That happened back then, too.”
So why do we continue singing murder ballads? Or consume any other kind of true crime media, for that matter?
“People are fascinated by pretty dark stuff,” said Mark Charles of Vandaveer. “It’s fitting and telling that in the ballad tradition, the more heinous the story, the more memorable it might become.”
Folks might be drawn to these dark stories, but when Vandaveer went on the road to promote their murder ballad album, they found audiences had a limited appetite for the songs.
“We quickly found that on stage a couple of murder ballads go along way,” Charles said. “Put three in a row in a set, and you can feel the air escape the room.”
Of course, Vandaveer knew it was dealing with dark stuff when it decided to make the album.
That’s why they also decided to give a portion of the proceeds to a womens’ crisis center in Louisville, Kentucky.
“It was important to us that we have some perspective and make sure that the audience was aware of that side of the project too,” Charles said.
Because as grim and disturbing as these stories can be, they are also depressingly familiar.
“The victims in the songs were women. And you know, stories of domestic abuse have not abated and instances of domestic abuse have not abated,” Charles said. “It’s a little bit like shining a light on a problem that’s been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.”
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
Suzannah Park is a ballad singer and teacher who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up singing all kinds of folk songs, but there are some ballads she just can’t bring herself to sing.
Some Appalachian ballads tell stories of gruesome murders of women at the hands of men. Others flip the script and allow women to emerge victorious, by playing tricks on captors or by fighting back.
Suzannah Park is a ballad singer and teacher who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. She grew up singing all kinds of folk songs, but there are some ballads she just can’t bring herself to sing. Inside Appalachia guest host Saro Lynch-Thomason recently spoke with Park about her relationship to ballads about women and violence.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Park: My grandparents got dubbed “the mom and pop of the Chicago folk music scene.” And they would host these really large music parties at their house as well. So different traveling musicians would come through and they would stay at my grandparents’. There would be a music party at my grandparents with that traveling musician, as well as loads of different local musicians. So it was really kind of a hub-home, where the performing, the sharing, the exchanging, the stories, the meals, were sort of all built in together.
Suzannah Park is a ballad singer and teacher who lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
And then my grandparents also did multiple trips coming down here to the south to collect songs—part of their way of keeping songs alive, collecting them, sharing them. So yeah, my mom and my aunt grew up in that. And then it continued when I was little. There were still people that would come through, and we would still have these music parties and do house concerts. And there were just a whole bunch of people that came through, which I didn’t realize were—you know, when you’re growing up, you’re just with the people you’re with and you love them. But I didn’t know that Jean Ritchie was special in, like, the history. I just knew that she and my grandma looked really good sitting together singing, you know? She was just like another sweet grandma. And I liked when they sang together because they had a lot of fun. They looked like they were happy together. And so I was just, like, “Oh, Jean’s here, yay!”
And similarly, so, other styles of music—Sparky Rucker was a really big musical influence. He and my parents and Guy and Candie Carawan did a tour together before I was born, here in the south. And so when I was growing up, Sparky, whenever he would come through Chicago, or when we were down here, going through Knoxville, we would always stay with them, or he would come and stay with us. So that was a different style of music that my family did, but I got to hear his stories all about slavery and about oppression from a Black blues-gospel singer-historian, and he was always one of my favorites when I was little. And I can recognize now, like, wow, I had this rich, wide, diverse collection of extended people. But also, I just thought that was normal.
Lynch-Thomason: From the outside, at least, that sounds like so much fun. [laughs] You know, I grew up outside of those traditions. And when I moved to western North Carolina, I was so pleased and honored by how easy it was to get to know a lot of traditional singers in the area and become a part of those communities. And nowadays, I think folk song communities are this big mix of people who both grew up in the traditions, like you, and then folks who are coming to it and are figuring it all out. And we’re all making this music together because it’s emotional, and it feels good, and it does so much for us as a community and as individuals.
And something I wanted us to talk about was, as women singing the songs, a lot of times these songs can be about women, and in really hard circumstances or women getting murdered. This can be really intense topic matter. And other times it can be really celebratory, stuff where women are really celebrating themselves, right? And so I’m curious, for you, as a woman singing the songs, are there ways that your experiences as a woman have shaped the repertoire that you’re attracted to or the songs you don’t want to sing?
Park: Great question. And a really important topic as well, just in all the ways that these songs as folk songs, I think, are an extension of the voice of the folk for so many generations. And so, yes, I think about this a lot in what I perform as well as what I teach. I would say that as a little person, I wanted to feel more heroic. I wanted to feel like I was represented in a better way in the stories and songs that I was growing up around. And my mom and my aunt had done some investigation to find songs that were, you know—the females came out victorious in some way.
My sister and I took it on as a project to collect more of those kinds of songs, because I think as kids growing up in the ’80s—so I was born in 82—there was just a lot of wanting to feel represented. There’s a handful of ballads that my family would sing that I have never committed to memory because they hurt too much to sing. But I know them but I still won’t sing them. I think as a singer, as a song carrier, you have to be able to also let the song through you, and some songs I think actually hurt a little too much to sing depending on your own personal experience.
Other songs I find really powerful that it’s like I can play a part in letting there be an opportunity for that voice to still come through me because there’s a way that it’s a relevant song still, that feels like I can hold that space and I can hold that space well. Songs give us an opportunity to tap into an emotion that we might not otherwise feel like there’s space for in our day. It’s like three to six minutes of giving your body an opportunity as the singer and also as the listener to let the story sort of wash through you.
And then my hope is that it can spark—maybe it sparks a discomfort, but I think any time there’s something hard, that also can mean that there’s an opportunity for it to have a release. And songs are just moving. And so it’s paying homage to history, to your own body, to people that might need to hear that this is a relevant issue. It’s been a valuable, cool thing that women can have victorious songs. Or, it is valid and recognizable that we still are murdering and making women go missing as a regular piece of today as well. So yeah, it’s a juicy, juicy, heartbreaking, beautiful, expansive—you know, half the planet is women, so these are songs that should be sung, and should be celebrated, and should be talked about.
Lynch-Thomason: I’m wondering if you could describe a song that you’re like, “Yeah, I’m not gonna sing that one. But here’s another hard one that does mean something to me.” Just to give examples for folks who aren’t as familiar with these genres.
Park: Well, the first song that came to mind is “The Two Sisters.” So I’m the younger of two sisters. My mom is the younger of two sisters. We were raised incredibly close, both of these pairs of siblings, singing and doing stuff together, performing together. And so “The Two Sisters” is this ballad that talks about these two sisters that are really close, and ageism, and the impact of that around if the younger person gets married first. And this is supposedly, historically, back in the day. And the older sister ends up murdering her younger sister because it would disrupt her opportunity for having a cared-for, abundant life, if she’s kind of made a spinster by having her younger sister get married first.
So it’s classism, and it’s sexism, and it’s ageism, all kind of rolled together. And then it’s siblings. And I think singing and being so close with my sibling, with my sister, there was a way that we could resonate and understand that the song sounds so brutal, and you’d think, like, “That sister’s so cold.” But from growing up and hearing so much about the history and the context of oppression in folk music in communities, for us, it was just like having to choose who’s going to survive. I’m thinking about the movie Sophie’s Choice, you know, pick a child, and it’s just sort of like, this is in that same place.
We just performed it once. And we both cried the entire time just standing on stage. And we’re like, “Yeah, we thought maybe we could pull this off.” And it was like, “Absolutely not. There is no way.” And we did fine until, I think, she pushes her into the water. And we both just lost it. It was like, “Oh, God, yeah, this just…”. There’s the empathy piece of being a sibling. Anyway, so that song I’ve never performed since then. I think I was 16. [laughs] And I can hear other people sing it. But I actively know—I kind of tune out a little. I still have a hard time being like—but I love talking about it. But actually trying to sing it and let those notes kind of come through me. I’m like, “Whew.” I skip it if it’s on anyone else’s record. I’m like, “Oh god, yeah, I can’t do that one still.”
So that’s one I’m not singing. One that I’m loving singing—loving is a weird word. One that I really enjoy teaching about and singing is “Orphan Girl.” So this is a young girl who is orphaned. And then it’s classism. She goes to a rich man’s house looking for some food, and the rich man won’t give her food and she freezes and dies out on the steps. It’s significant to me that it’s a little girl asking, but the entire picture is also sort of showing all these different pieces of oppression. At the same time.
Lynch-Thomason: I’m wondering if you could give an example of a song that does kind of flip that script. You know, the songs that your aunt and mother were looking for, that you were looking for, that I also look for, about women kindof getting their way, or something coming out kind of unexpectedly in the woman’s favor.
Park: Yeah, there’s one song that’s coming to mind. It’s called “The Maid on the Shore.” It’s a song about a sea captain who sees a woman on the shore and bribes his men to go and seduce her and get her onto the ship, and then they can all have their way with her and he’ll reward them all for bringing this woman onto the ship. And they go and they get her, and they bring her. And she has this spectacular verse of thanking them all for letting her get here, that she’s just been so tired of being a maiden.
[Singing:]
Oh, thank you, oh thank you, this young girl did cry.
That’s just what I’ve been waiting for, oh,
I’ve grown so weary of my maiden head,
as I walked all alone on my rocky ol’ shore
as I walked all alone on the shore.
And then she sat herself down in the stern of the ship,
and the moon, it shown gentle and clear, oh,
and she sang so sweet and so neat and complete,
she sang sailors and captain right fast asleep.
She sang sailors and captain asleep.
And then she robbed them of silver and robbed them of gold.
She plundered their costly fine ware, oh.
And that captain’s broadsword, she’s took for an oar,
and paddled her away right back to the shore.
She’s paddled right back to the shore.
Oh, were my men crazy, or were they all drunk?
Or were they sunk deep in despair, oh?
To see her get away with her beauty so gay,
how those sailors all wished that that sweet maid was there,
how the sailors all wished she was there.
But there she stands all alone on the strand, oh,
waving her handkerchief fair, oh,
Say you are the captain that sails the salt seas,
and I’m still a maid on my rocky old shore.
I’m a maiden once more on the shore.
So yeah, that’s one of the songs that, I think, particularly being someone who has—I’ve had multiple assaults in my life. And I think that there’s something that feels helpful in singing something that goes so well, in getting out of that situation, that feels fantastical, but also that that’s part of a song, I think, for myself, that feels really healing. To be like, it definitely wasn’t fantastical for me to try to get out of these situations I was in, and so there’s an opportunity to sort of have that hope. Some part of me wanted that sort of outcome and it didn’t happen that way. But I can still sing about it. And that brings part of the healing.
We’ve come such a long way around sexism. And whenever someone offers another one of these songs, it’s like an emotionally—it’s not about the men losing. It’s just about the idea that this woman’s going to be victorious. So it’s never, to me, it’s not like “Who did she cunningly trick?” I’m just like, “She made it,” like, that’s the thing. I’m so relieved. I’m just like, “I’m so glad that got celebrated.” [laughs] The trickery part is not the most important to me in the song. It brings me a smile, but it’s really the survival that is the focus for me.
Lynch-Thomason: Thank you so much for talking with us today, Suzannah. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.
Park: It’s a pleasure. I could hang out with you all day.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, which is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to Inside Appalachia to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
