I Like Death Ballads
I had an intersting conversation with someone the other day when I brought up my small collection of "Death Ballad" songs. Some songs like "Down by the Ohio", "Marry of the Wild Moore", "Country Death Song", "25 Minutes to Go", "Joe Bean", "The Banks of the Lee", "How's it Going to End", "The Ship that Never Returned", El Paso", "Wreck of Old 97" or even "Ballad of Dwight Fry" fit better into the catagory than others.
I'm not exactly why, but listening to them tends to cheer me up a bit. It's not about someone whining about things that coulda been, or stuff you can just "get over"... they're about the finality. Rarely are they sung in the First-Person, but rather a narritive about the actions someone took to a completed stage--maybe they committed a crime and were punished for it, maybe they died because of some action they took, or because of bad or unexpected circumstances. In the end, there's an action, a consequence, a resolution (for the most part.) It's not someone just whining about "oh, how terrible things are" that can be turned around... there's just death.
The person I was talking to told me "So you would prefer death over whining?" and my answer? "YES!" Yes, I think that a song of resolution, or a narritive is better than someone just crying about crap that everyone goes through. I mean, seriously... "oh, my heart is broken. She found another guy/girl and now I'm soooo torn." gets old fast. But give me a song about a guy who sees his girl being hit on by another guy and shoots him there in the bar in front of his buddies... then runs away to save his life, but returns regardless for the woman he loves and is shot dead by the slain man's friends, only to die in the arms of the woman he was infatuated with... and all the while, he calls her 'evil' and 'wicked'... and you never know if it really was her in the end, or just his dying mind making it up." (That's Marty Robbins' "El Paso/Rose's Cantina", by the way). But regardless, there isn't this whining, or sniveling about it... I don't know. I just like the darker stuff. (That's not to say I don't enjoy other music too. I just also happen to really like the Death Ballads as well.)
I'm not exactly why, but listening to them tends to cheer me up a bit. It's not about someone whining about things that coulda been, or stuff you can just "get over"... they're about the finality. Rarely are they sung in the First-Person, but rather a narritive about the actions someone took to a completed stage--maybe they committed a crime and were punished for it, maybe they died because of some action they took, or because of bad or unexpected circumstances. In the end, there's an action, a consequence, a resolution (for the most part.) It's not someone just whining about "oh, how terrible things are" that can be turned around... there's just death.
The person I was talking to told me "So you would prefer death over whining?" and my answer? "YES!" Yes, I think that a song of resolution, or a narritive is better than someone just crying about crap that everyone goes through. I mean, seriously... "oh, my heart is broken. She found another guy/girl and now I'm soooo torn." gets old fast. But give me a song about a guy who sees his girl being hit on by another guy and shoots him there in the bar in front of his buddies... then runs away to save his life, but returns regardless for the woman he loves and is shot dead by the slain man's friends, only to die in the arms of the woman he was infatuated with... and all the while, he calls her 'evil' and 'wicked'... and you never know if it really was her in the end, or just his dying mind making it up." (That's Marty Robbins' "El Paso/Rose's Cantina", by the way). But regardless, there isn't this whining, or sniveling about it... I don't know. I just like the darker stuff. (That's not to say I don't enjoy other music too. I just also happen to really like the Death Ballads as well.)