Over the summer I learned a few tunes from Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk songs. One of the more darker songs was a murder ballad called, “Lone Green Valley”.
I uploaded a simple recording of the song to my SoundCloud which can be found here.
The story behind this song has a dark and mysterious origin. “A woman in Mississippi in 1929 confessed to a murder by mailing the Governor of the State an adaptation of this song.” – Alan Lomax
The song also inspired a very famous piece of American Regionalist art. “The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley” was painted by Thomas Hart Benton in 1934 and it depicts the murder of the woman in the song.
I found a recording of “Lone Green Valley” sung by Vernon Delhart, an American country singer and songwriter, on YouTube which was recorded in 1929.
I find that many American folk songs have very dark lyrics yet the tune and chords remain upbeat. In my version of the song, I changed the chords slightly to emphasize the sadness and pointlessness of the woman’s death.
“One has constantly to remind oneself of the extremes of repressiveness of the age that revelled in these bloody songs – an epoch when a leg was called a limb, even by country people- and age when women were bundled up in forty petticoats and shielded by bustles – a time when no respectable woman could speak to a stranger in the street without a breath of scandal falling upon her – a century when there were only two paths open to women, one leading to the red lights, the other toward the altar. For the people of this period, the folk ballads had a special significance; they stood for pleasure and for excitement, which the age had subordinated to work and to respectability.” – Burl Ives.
Terra Burgoyne 