A Brief Literary History of the Murder Ballad, in Honor of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter

I know there are more beautiful things than Beyoncé. But I’m also 1) grateful for any pop artist committed to reinvention and 2) actively trying to be less of a killjoy, just for my spirit’s sake. That said: happy New Bey day, to all who celebrate. 

Much (tedious) has already been said about Bey’s “going country.” I am not here to litigate—though I will say that I wish I had a southbound highway to speed on, while listening to this album. What I am most fascinated by is the pastiche in Cowboy Carter. For as she paid tribute to disco in Renaissance, on the new record Bey is laying laurels for country music. There is conscious honky-tonk homage in these tracks. And I speak not just in terms of the aesthetic package, or even the artists she features (Linda Martell!), but the lyrical forms. Namely? The murder ballad. 

Cowboy Carter includes a revamped cover of Dolly Parton’s “JOLENE.” But in Bey’s version, the speaker isn’t pleading–she’s actively threatening the “hussy with the good hair.” The subsequent track, “DAUGHTER,” is a dyed-in-the-wool call to violence. Over plunking, gloomy piano, we are led to believe that the threatened deed has been done. “Your body laid out on these filthy floors,” Bey sings. “Your bloodstains on my custom couture.” 

The murder ballad has a long and funky history. I first made its acquaintance via Jimi Hendrix’s version of “Hey Joe,” a song that is musically perfect but disturbing if you think about it too much, which at sixteen, I did not. In a motif typical to the form, “Hey Joe,” describes the (inevitable, righteous) murder of a cheating wife from the perspective of a frankly encouraging bystander. 

Writing in The Yale Review, Harold Schechter called ballads like these “the oldest form of true crime literature.” The form can be traced back to 16th century Europe, but was popularized in Elizabethan England, where the ballad was reliable bread and butter for the (morbid) traveling bard. Poets would whip up some descriptive verse after a grisly crime happened and then peddle the salacious deets around the region for room and board. Such chronicles were later published as “broadsides.” 

In these ballads, the women became instigators, often destroying the men who’d wronged them first.

Once imported to America, British and Irish immigrants picked up where the broadsides left off, specifically in Appalachia. In the late nineteenth century, songs like “The Knoxville Girl,” sprouted from the seeds of earlier tales of English violence. But this being America, the form was complicated by some cultural cannibalism. Murders first memorialized in jailhouse blues lyrics, or Black “toasts,” wound their way back to whiter sources. See the cover of “Stagger Lee,” popularized by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds on their self-explanatory album, Murder Ballads (1996).

With few exceptions—“Stagger Lee” being an interesting case—the victims in most of those early ballads are women. And the speakers tended to show at least tacit approval of the violence, whether inhabiting the bystander position or the voice of the murderer himself. All this is deliberate, scholars say. From England onward, the form frequently functioned as a social tool. Ballads were cautionary tales designed to intimidate unruly, promiscuous women. In a way, we can trace that twisty morality through the ages; from “Omie Wise,” to “JOLENE,” the “hussy,” had better beware. 

But—plot twist—in the 1940s, songwriters like Patsy Montana and Wanda Jackson turned the form on its head, recording femme-forward revenge narratives like “The Box it Came In.” In these ballads, the women became instigators, often destroying the men who’d wronged them first. This trend continued through the 60s, heavily influencing the very same Dolly P you’ll find introducing track ten of Cowboy Carter. And later, The Chicks. 

Considering all this history, what kind of reclaiming, then, is “DAUGHTER?” On the one hand, Bey is honoring an old form, and notably one that has not given much historical credit to its Black architects. By embodying the villainous would-be fatale with unruly urges, she’s sort of making a second wave stand, in the vein of those mid-century stylists and Dolly herself. But if all these threats on another woman’s life function mainly as fealty-pledge to Jay-Z? Well, I’m at something of a subversive loss. 

Yet: it’s Friday. The sun is shining. And I am not a killjoy! If you don’t want to think about morally ambiguous violence today, may I recommend skipping to “II MOST WANTED,” the vibey Miley collaboration that made me think of a much cleaner-cut revenge tale: Thelma & Louise. 

“I’ll be your shotgun rider till the day I die…”