A Resisting Performance of an Appalachian Traditional Murder Ballad: Giving Voice to "Pretty Polly"

It ain't about how pretty you sing, it's all about how good you tell the story.

Dellie Norton, traditional ballad singer, Madison County NC, as told to the author by Sheila Kay Adams, Norton's great-niece, 7 November 2004

Scenario 1: My partner's mother introduces me to her friends: a white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual couple. They are in their late sixties or early seventies and are from northeastern Ohio, just one county away from those considered Appalachian. Clearly a part of the symphony set, their faces brighten when they learn I'm a musicologist stopping off in Ohio on my way to a music workshop in North Carolina.

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to study old-time music, specifically, the banjo."

"What is that?" he says with a raised eyebrow.

"Old-time music," I say very simplistically, since I can tell they are already losing interest, "is the kind of music that predates bluegrass and contemporary country music. It's a kind of early country music, actually."

"Oh," he says with a look of amused condescension, "I didn't think you could call that music."

Scenario 2: A friend who loves old-time music and bluegrass and who plays fiddle, guitar, mandolin, and Dobro decides that she can't listen to most old-time and bluegrass bands anymore since so many of the songs are misogynist. It is the violent ones that anger her the most, especially the murder ballads, in which the woman is horrifically killed and her murderer suffers few consequences. The Country Gentlemen's recording of "River Bottom" is particularly offensive to her: "with a clothesline tied around her knees . . . I'm so glad to put an end to that disease."

These true stories illustrate a dilemma for the feminist lover of old-time, bluegrass, and Appalachian music.¹ The first scenario demonstrates a widely held position: Appalachian music, with its unabashed banjo twanginess, its hoedown fiddle, and its high, strained, and dispassionate vocal style, is a vivid aural representation of Appalachia itself and as such cannot be considered music worthy of serious study, much less enjoyment. As Ronald D. Eller writes, "Appalachia may likely have replaced the benighted South as the nation's most maligned region. . . . Always part of the mythical South, Appalachia continues to languish backstage in the American drama, still dressed, in the popular mind at least, in the garments of backwardness, violence, poverty, and hopelessness once associated with the South as a whole. No other region of the United States today plays the role of the 'other America' quite so persistently as Appalachia."²

Of course, there is an audience that enjoys escaping into precisely this "other America," with its somewhat exotic rural sounds and modal melodies that can conjure up images of a simpler and more authentic era and place, far from urban noise and confusion.³ Some of these listeners may choose to ignore the misogynist lyrics or perhaps not even notice them, while others may explain them away as artifacts of past cultural norms.⁴ Others, however, like the woman in the second scenario, may feel conflicted, eventually choosing to abandon a favorite genre of music that is both "maligned" by "the popular mind" and unmistakably misogynist for the listener, fan or not, who attends to the lyrics of much of its repertoire. I would like to examine another option for the woman in the second scenario. Perhaps it is possible to find or create performances of Appalachian music that retain the exuberance of the fiddle, the twang of the banjo, or the detachment of the voice (performances that, in effect, sound Appalachian) while presenting the violent lyrics in a way that does not celebrate or ignore their misogyny. The most challenging songs will, of course, be the murder...