Love is red, death is blue

Where are ballads coming from now? Are they coming?

S.W.: I want to hear Cecil's ballad of Laci Peterson, myself. Certainly the form is still there. I think there are plenty of ballads still being written. And they're being written in some ways in the same way. "Nebraska" is as strong a ballad as you're going to find. They don't always come out in the usual way. If you're expecting someone to come onstage with a guitar and a harmonica just like Springsteen did, that's one thing. But they can come out in all kinds of ways. The soul ballad we have on the record, [Bobby Patterson's] "The Trial of Mary Maguire," now, there's a song that was released in 1969, got absolutely nowhere, was a flop but a song that, if written today, reads like it comes out of the morning paper. Look, people are at least as imaginative now in retelling stories as they were back then. There is, I think, as I said before, a question of the language, and I sometimes wonder if that language is as widely understood as it might have been at one time.

Greil, we're almost 40 years from it but you'd probably give "Ode to Billie Joe" as an example.

G.M.: Sure. "Ode to Billie Joe" is a great ballad and it instantly struck a chord across the country when that song appeared. It did have a hook; its hook was the mystery: What are they throwing off the bridge? All the unanswered questions. The whole ballad, again -- I keep going back to this: In this part of the song, nothing happens. There is that emptiness, that void. One of the things that modernity has introduced into the ballad is abstraction, an emphasis on those blank spots. David Thomas has been working on a song for quite some time, he's recorded a couple variations on it, a song called "Little Sister," which is based on the Raymond Chandler novel. It doesn't follow the novel in a literalistic way. It's more about the gaps, the places where the story stops short -- when there's a phone call and nobody answers, that sort of thing. And Dylan is tremendous at making a ballad almost completely out of hints, rather than telling you, There once was a woman named so-and-so and she walked down the street and this bad thing happened to her, now her ghost watches over her grave.

That's what Wendy Lesser's essay [on Dylan's "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts"] is about.

G.M.: Yeah. And I think, with "Nebraska," Springsteen -- just amazingly -- combines an old modal melody, so that you feel like you're listening to something that's hundreds of years old, with the voice of a funeral director and yet there's so much openness in the song, that Howard Hampton in his piece on it in this book is able to play tricks with it. He's able to have all different kinds of people flitting in and out of that song, and then people come out of the song and begin to wreak havoc in other realms. I think ballads are all over the place. But I think that one of the things the writers in this book did for Sean and me was to show us that our notion of what a ballad is is somewhat impoverished. That if the burden of the ballad is to tell a story, often it's done through gaps, hints, warnings and allusions.

Cecil Brown makes an argument in his piece about "Frankie and Johnny" that it had an author, a single real person who wrote this song, and that all kinds of other people brought what they had to bring to it. And he says at the end, "It may be that, yes, to create a great folk ballad, you need a village -- but you may also need an untaught genius." In this sense, people continue to draw on this sense of tradition, this sense of legacy, this particular language, but with the notion that they have to bring something totally of themselves to it. And that may mean breaking the form down.

S.W.: I think that the idea of ellipsis, the idea of indirection, the idea of engagement is absolutely crucial to the ballad form in America. It's a literary form. One of the other ways to get at why Dylan is such a master of this is in Dave Marsh's piece, which, believe it or not, manages to make a connection between Dylan singing "Barbara Allen" in [New York's] Gaslight Cafe in 1962, and the way that he did that, and to see that as the beginning of everything that was going to end up in his very early rock 'n' roll. We all think of that as surrealistic but it has a root in myth and in ellipsis and in indirection. And that's an American form that not only in the ballad, it's a literary form, too. Think of Emily Dickinson. Think of "Moby-Dick," which is full of allegories that aren't allegories. It's part of an American language that isn't only in the ballad.

If gaps are part of what make a ballad, is it fair to say that those of us listening have to become ballad singers ourselves?

S.W.: We have to become complicit in the ballad. That's one of the things the ballad demands. We have to be part of what is going on. We have to be active listeners. We have to fill in the gaps. As Wendy Lesser says, you can't understand "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" any other way. She listened to it 10 times before she actually listened to the words, then she had to figure out what it meant.

G.M.: Part of what that means is that you as a listener have to be ready to take on any of the roles that are sketched out in a ballad. And a good ballad will make you do that, will make you be both killer and victim in the story that's being told. In Rennie Sparks' piece on "Pretty Polly," she does that. She starts out right off the bat saying, "God this is so romantic, it's so glamorous, all the blood in the forest." She ends her piece, this historical, logical exploration of "Pretty Polly," talking about Richard Speck killing the eight nurses in Chicago. And then, as we discovered after Richard Speck died, how Richard Speck became a woman in prison, through hormone treatments. And she starts comparing him to Ed Gein, wearing the skin of his victims over his own body. And you suddenly realize, you absolutely cannot tell who's who anymore. That's a lot of what the ballad does. It is meant to play on your identity and to take it away.

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