Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad”

 and the Artful Use of Vulgarity

 

The text of the lyrics of “The Murder Ballad” is available at both http://www.doctorjazz.co.uk/locspeech3.html#locaafs3 (which also includes transcriptions of Morton’s comments) and https://louismaistros.livejournal.com/47509.html.

 

 

     During 1938 recordings of Jelly Roll Morton for the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax inquired about the musician’s early days playing in Storyville brothels.   Morton was initially reluctant to sing vulgar lyrics, but aided by whiskey and Lomax’s encouragement, Morton performed that day a version of “The Dirty Dozen,” an extraordinarily explicit “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” and a thirty minute long song titled “The Murder Ballad.”  Because of its obscene language, the recording was not released (nor the lyrics printed) until 2005.  The musician’s position as an innovator present at the birth of jazz and the replication of the sensibility of a licentious atmosphere already in the past make this recording significant historically.  The loose, improvisatory lyrics are a model of oral composition.

     The generic title “The Murder Ballad” sounds like a chapter heading in a folksong book likely because it was added by Lomax after Morton provided none.  Songs on the theme of homicide had, of course, made up a significant portion of the traditional English ballad repertory well before similar songs were recorded among African-Americans.  Most often, the killer’s motive on both sides of the Atlantic is sexual, either a lover killing a rival or a faithless man doing away with a cast-off partner.  The popularity of such stories is hardly surprising given that they combine the deepest human fears and desires centering around love and sex as well as aggression and death.

     The title is also apposite in that Morton seems to be improvising from the start.  Having just finished the playfully transgressive “The Dirty Dozen,” Morton continued his high-spirited violation of verbal taboos.  Using the formulae available in the tradition, he composed a story conventional in that it describes the crime in sensational and lurid detail before eventually arriving at a moralizing ending and integrating conventional phrases into a dramatic narrative with a multiplicity of voices.

     Even while Lomax kept refilling his glass, Morton was experienced enough to not only tell the story in an effective and artful manner, but to couch his narration in a well-structured and effective pattern (the sort of planning the ancient rhetoricians called dispositio).  He accommodated this process to the technical strictures of the session.  Cutting aluminum discs which had a maximum length of a little over four minutes, Morton had to stop singing (though he kept vamping on the piano) until Lomax had set up the next – the whole song took seven records, each a separate lyric with a clear internal unity.

     In the first the female persona threatens her rival with flaming language.    The extravagance of the rhetoric signifies passionate intensity but it also is entertaining in itself, particularly when expressed in words ordinarily tabooed.  These may be witty, amounting almost to a riddle: “If you don’t leave my man alone they’ll find you every Decoration Day” or intensely fierce: “Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking throat and drink your blood like wine.”  In the Storyville brothels such wild energies were recognized, respected, and incorporated into art.

     The second record, labeled by Lomax “The Murder Ballad, part 2” narrates the defiance of the rival lover who declares, in the first variation of the persona’s voice, “This ain’t no slavery time, and I’m sure that I’m free” and then the murder. The act of killing is described once realistically and once with the passion of mad jealousy: “She said, ‘Open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between your thighs.’”

     The variation in speakers continues in part 3 where other inmates, the prosecutor, jury, and judge are quoted as well as the protagonist who unapologetically admits her crime.  The performance circumstances are evident as Morton pauses in this section to note “Oh, that’s good whisky, makes me moan.”

     A conventional murder ballad would have likely concluded at this point, but Morton goes on in part 4 to detail the prisoner’s resort to masturbation and lesbianism in prison: “Time is comin’ a woman won’t need no man,/ You can get it all with your beautiful hand.”  While it may be true that while incarcerated many might think, “I can’t have a man, so a woman is my next bet,” but Morton dramatizes the aggressive tone of some such jailhouse relationships: “I’m goin’ to get some of this cunt, you bitch, I said.”  The listener is now in the realm of a sort of carnivalesque eroticism characteristic of obscenity, an infantile polymorphous perversity where anything goes, but with the harsh reminder of exploitation and selfishness.  The ideal of a monogamous relationship implied by “my man” has been abandoned, but the sexual energy is undiminished.

     The celebration of their opportunistic sex continues in the 5^th section

 

I want you to screw me, screw me like a dog

Screw me behind, sweet bitch, screw me like a dog

When it gets good, I want to holler out like a hog

 

We are here in the chaotic orgiastic atmosphere of the toast called “The Freaks’ Ball” (or ”The Bull-daggers’ Ball”).  The passage concludes, however, with a fond reminiscence of her male lover and the punning realization that, while she may still have a bed partner, her life is harshly compromised.  “Now I’m screwed, I’m behind the walls for a long time.”

     This leads directly to the moralizing conclusion of the 6^th and 7^th sections of the song, telling listeners “please don’t be like me.”  Realizing that she is in prison ”for my natural life, she reflects on the conundrum of romantic love.  Immediately after saying “I’m sorry, babe, sorry to my heart/  I’m sorry that that argument ever did start,” she calls him “a dirty rotten son of a bitch.”  Faced with the contradiction, all she can do is “pray and pray and pray and pray and pray.”  The final section is a lament for mortality, intensified by the isolation of imprisonment.  The very last lines repeat the ethical theme, while with the very last words retain a memory of worldly desire, a mere phantom in the mind of a prisoner of the state: “try to be a good girl/  That’s the only way you gonna wear your diamonds and pearls.”

     In the closest thematic register Morton’s poem recreates the self-consciously libertine atmosphere of the New Orleans brothels where he had entertained.  Its physicality, hyperbole, and braggadocio shape a narrative that foregrounds the most potent and elemental forms of desire, eros and thanatos, love and aggression.  At the same time this story, which is set in the demi-monde where such raw passions are undisguised and originally performed in whorehouses where few idealistic illusions can survive, is a poignant testament to the spirit.  The female persona Morton adopts for the song, though battered by life and facing death, can yet formulate an artfully shaped aesthetic object, not to change the harsh conditions of existence, but to gain some sense of mastery while facing the impossible odds of life.  Surely every human has experienced (though in widely varying forms and degrees) the impetuous appetitive lust, the helpless and vulnerable romanticism of a mutual love relationship.  Morton and his audience responded in the language of their own time and place, no less than the seventeenth century Cantabrigian who wrote that, at the best, we “tear our pleasures with rough strife/  Through the iron gates of life.”