How to change culture (for Dolores and all the others)
Cheryl Brown
The other day I listened to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’
1996 recording of “Knoxville Girl,” a traditional ballad about a girl from my
hometown who got pummeled to death with a stick by her lover and dumped into
the Tennessee River. The lyrics are typical of many a handed-down English folk
song in that it features the violent murder of a sweet, young, not-so-innocent
thing.
Scots-Irish and English immigrants (settlers who may have been
indentured servants, religious and economic refugees, colonizers, possibly all
of the above) brought the seeds of this song to the US and then unto
Appalachia. Besides Nick Cave, the Louvin Brothers, Lemon Drops, BR549,
Outlaws, and many others have covered “Knoxville Girl.”
I suspect some don’t
even think twice about singing from the point of view of the murderer who is
sitting in jail feeling sorry for himself. Perhaps this song was once meant to
scare young people off from fooling around before wedlock, but it often come
across, at least to me, as more sympathetic to a man grieving for the loss of
his freedom rather than the loss of a young woman’s life. Perspective means
everything. Anyway the words are at the bottom of this post so see for
yourself.
Although I grew up hearing a lot of folk music, I only
really learned about the lineage of murder ballads my first year back in the
States, when I spent my second semester at Friends World College doing an
apprenticeship and self-guided study on urban Appalachians, migration, and
culture. My advisor was an ethnomusicologist who supported my investigations of
country music on juke boxes in downtown Cincinnati dive bars. Grandma Bonnie
Blanton Vance kinda territory. I learned as much from the other patrons’ stories
as I did from the lyrics we sang along to over shots and beers.
For part of my apprenticeship at the Urban Appalachian
Council, I put to good use skills I had honed organizing punk shows helping out
with the musical and storytelling stages of the annual Appalachian Festival.
Because I was once again behind the scenes and not in the audience, I got to
meet the likes of the Dillards, Dry Branch Fire Squad, Rich Kirby, Sparky and
Rhonda Rucker, and Sheila Kay Adams, whose version of “Knoxville Girl” is one
of the best I’ve heard, sung in the true ol’ timey way.
I got to work with some
of the godfathers and godmothers of the Cincinnati hillbilly music scene, one
of whom invited me to his house after the festival to confess he had fallen in
love with me, a 22- year-old less than half his age. I went because a group of
us had been meeting there to plan the thing. After that, I withdrew and was
never involved with that group of people again.
A few years later, I went to grad school in Washington DC
and wasted hours that should have been dedicated to writing about the impact of
structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund on
poor people in poor countries, instead browsing the library stacks which held
rare books full of old songs collected by jobless artists dispatched by the
Works Progress Administration to the Third World hollers of Southern
Appalachia.
I formed a band and found my voice while working out harmonies and
writing lyrics that were basically revenge fantasies in which the fair maiden
gets revenge on the man who led her down the proverbial path in the woods to a
muddy, soon bloody riverbank.
My songs weren’t nearly as good as Hazel Dickens
and Alice Gerrard’s recordings of feminist folk songs from the 1960s and 70s,
but can be seen as stemming from that tradition, with the addition of the
electric guitars and distortion pedals of 1980s punk and 1990s shoegaze.
Changing culture takes decades of work over many generations.
I’ve often thought that by getting me out of Knoxville when
I was a jaded and angry 15-year-old punk, my parents steered me off a bad
trajectory. I was able to get a much better education and came to understand
the world in ways that I simply could not had I stayed in my hometown. I gained
perspectives that East Tennessee preachers and some of my schoolteachers tried
to shield me from, because such knowledge liberates one from the narrow
cultural, political, and religious grips in which they wanted to keep me and
the other Knoxville girls.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Cheryl and I have been friends for 30 years, meeting early on in her organizing career and staying in touch through the years. What Cheryl doesn't mention is her deep family ties to Rhode Island and that she has moved back to Rhode Island after a long organizing stint in California. - Will Collette
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