Love is red, death is blue

Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz discuss their amazing new anthology of writing about the American ballad -- and wonder whether Republicans sing better songs of passion and murder than Democrats do.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 17, 2004 | Open up the new collection of essays "The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad," begin reading the real and imagined stories that make up its investigation of American ballads, and you will believe that the air itself has become a radio. Songs are all around you, with their inevitable tales of lost love, or love turned to murder or other forms of death, swirling through the air, not so much raising the dead as reminding you that those people and places you thought of as dead were always with us, waiting for their moment to reclaim their hold on you.

The songs speak in the language of dread and mystery, of glory found and damnation fallen into. In his essay on "Barbara Allen," Dave Marsh writes about the outcome of the song, the intertwined rose and briar emerging from the graves of the spurned lover and the haughty girl who rejected him, as being both necessary and right. Marsh is talking about accepting the fantastic as fact, and yet doing so in a way that doesn't take those strange wonders for granted. The lives described in these songs are lives lived in the face of something that fills us with awe and fear, something bigger than ourselves, whether God or fate.

That is not a bad way to make art, or to experience it. And the writers that editors Sean Wilentz, the Princeton University historian, and Greil Marcus, the cultural critic (and former Salon columnist) whose books include "Mystery Train," "Lipstick Traces" and "Invisible Republic," invited to contribute essays on the American ballad of their choice respond with the awe and delight and reverence of being in the midst of something bigger than they are. Among the writers here -- a lineup that includes Joyce Carol Oates, Stanley Crouch, Sarah Vowell, Paul Berman, Steve Erickson and Howard Hampton -- are musicians: David Thomas, leader of the great art-punk band Pere Ubu; Rennie Sparks of the alt-country duo the Handsome Family; Anna Domino of Snakefarm; Jon Langford of the Mekons.

Among the straight essays are entries that are short stories, collages, even R. Crumb's illustrated version of "When You Go A Courtin'" accompanied by a letter explaining why he could never consent to being in a book that extolled the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a song he loathes. In other words, among the jokes, threats, warnings and prophecies that make up the ballads under consideration are all the idiosyncrasies the contributors bring to them.

I talked by phone to Greil Marcus at his home in Berkeley, Calif., and Sean Wilentz in his office at Princeton about how the book came together, how the contributions surprised them, about their wish to recapture the language of American ballads, about who are better ballad singers, Republicans or Democrats, and the gaps that draw us into ballads and make us complicit with their most heavenly ecstasies and most dastardly crimes.

You're coming to this project from different disciplines. Greil, you're a cultural critic, and Sean, you're a historian. What were the differences in your approach?

Greil Marcus: Well, Sean and I have worked together for the last several years at Princeton. Both in terms of Sean being the director of the American studies program and my teaching in it, but also in terms of conversations about politics; Sean being involved in bringing Bob Dylan to Princeton in 2000, a year when he also brought Bill Clinton to Princeton. And Sean is an academic historian but he's also the official historian of the Bob Dylan Web site, and knows a lot more about folk music and the ballad tradition than I do. So there's a lot of crossover there.

Sean Wilentz: Yeah, I never encountered a difference in discipline or even in fields or expertise. It was more of a blending of interests but also curiosities and style. I've collaborated many times on many things, publications, etc. Never have I had so much fun, never has it gone more smoothly, and never has there been less of a disjunction. I've had more disjunction working with other historians than with Greil. And I suppose that's just a matter of how your respective minds work, but it also says something about the uselessness of certain disciplinary boundaries. You don't have to be a historian to think historically and Greil's as good a historian as anybody.

G.M.: One of the most interesting things about how this shook out in terms of disciplines or approaches is that we had no idea what approach anybody was going to take. The charge here for the people who accepted the invitation to participate in this was to choose a ballad and run with it, come up with your own approach, take your own tack. What was so surprising and lucky for us is there are no two pieces where people follow the same formula or approach. Everybody came up with something utterly idiosyncratic. For example, we invited several musicians to take part, not because we knew anything about their writing, but because their sensibilities were so interesting and so unique we decided, "Well, let's take a chance."

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