Love is red, death is blue

G.M.: You know, there was a column written by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, and the same sort of thing has been written and said by all kinds of people throughout the entire election season. People were voting against their own interests, their own economic interests. If they voted for Bush, people without a lot of money, they were voting against themselves. Well, people want the opportunity to vote for more than themselves --

Someone wrote in to the Times and said they were voting their interests because their interests were more spiritual than economic.

GM: Well, it isn't just spiritual. They want to be part of something bigger, they want to be part of a bigger story than themselves reduced to a few numbers. You know, what Sean just said about the Republicans singing the ballad better than the Democrats in this election -- and of course you can look back to 1992 and turn that exactly backward. There's a paragraph from Sinclair Lewis' novel "It Can't Happen Here," which was published in 1935. And it's about a right-wing populist senator, a Democrat, taking the nomination away from FDR in 1936 at the Democratic convention and then going on to steamroller his way into the presidency and begin to rule as a fascist dictator. FDR, after having been denied the nomination, forms his own party, called the Jeffersonian Party, and the Republicans run a liberal senator against Buzz Windrip, who is the right-wing Democratic nominee. And here's Sinclair Lewis summing up the election:

"The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge [the Republican nominee] was that it represented integrity and reason in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery sensations associated usually, not with monetary systems and taxation rates, but with baptism by immersion in a creek, young love under the elms, straight whiskey, angelic orchestras heard soaring down the full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon."

S.W.: That's it.

G.M.: That's it.

S.W.: Those are the ballads.

In your piece, Greil, you write about the embarrassment you felt as a kid singing folk music in school. And I think that a lot of what we hear when we hear folk music is something very strange. The idea of folk music, whether it's true or not, is that it's supposed to be something natural and recognizable. Only what we hear seems so strange, part of a world we don't understand, and one of the points you make in this book and in "Invisible Republic" is that it's supposed to be strange.

G.M.: Yeah, it comes out of a whole well of the forbidden. One of the reasons ballads focus so strongly on murders, and particularly murders of young women, is that events like these take place in communities and then they're forgotten, they're not spoken of. But there has to be a way for the memory to be preserved. I was doing a reading last week for this book with Cecil Brown who wrote about "Frankie and Albert," "Frankie and Johnny" in the book. And he started off by talking about the Laci Peterson case and he said it's really interesting to ask why some crimes find their form in ballads and why others are completely thrown off by the tradition.

Now, the Laci Peterson case, he said, is made for a ballad. Why? Because it happened on Christmas Eve. He immediately digs into that and says, this is something the ballad needs. It needs more than: Here was a murder. It has to strike some kind of chord. And, yes, husbands kill their wives all the time. And here's a case of a husband killing a pregnant wife. Now, that's the way it always happens. No [Brown said], you need something more. You need God looking down. That's what's happening. God is going to be telling the story of this ballad. He just spun this off. And that's a lot of it, I think. It is finding a way of talking about what can't be talked about. What I was so horrified by as a kid was the blandness of folk music, the way in which there were no emotions in it, there was nothing scary about it. It was all good-time singalongs --

Was that because of what you were singing or because of the commercial face of folk music at the time?

G.M.: No, it had to do with the fact that I was attending a left-wing Quaker school where all people are alike and everyone shares the same feelings and all we want to do is hold hands and be brothers and sisters -- the whole world! There was an ideology that took the scariness out of folk music, and took the badness out of folk music, and it wasn't really until I heard this old woman on TV sing "The Streets of Laredo" that I began to understand that what folk music is about is death and the many ways in which you can die, and the many reasons for which you can die, and the ways in which you never die. And how hard it is actually to kill anything.

Now when you go back to the blandest of the bland folk music of the 1960s, and then you listen to the Harry Smith "Anthology of American Music" and you hear this strangeness and the weirdness and the oddity and the singularity that one person brings to a ballad or song that so many thousands of people have sung -- not to toot our own horns, but there is an analogue for that in this book. Which is that you could pick another 20-some really terrific people and have them write about the same ballads that people chose for this book and they would come up with something completely different. The idiosyncrasy that is coded in the ballad form that demands it of the singer also demands it of the writers in this book. That's what the ballad wanted and that's what the ballad got.

Next Page: "We become complicit in the ballad ... a good ballad will make you be both killer and victim"

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