Georgia Lee

She'd been dumped there in a patch of trees, and her death barely made the newspapers. This was around the time of the Polly Klaas case — or during some other headline-making search for an abducted girl — and Waits was disturbed at the possibility that kids like Georgia Lee don't get as much coverage because they're too poor, or too black, or too troubled, or they're not photogenic enough, or ...

                                              -  Kurt Gegenhuber, The Celestial Monocord


Sung from the perspective of a murdered girl's father, "Georgia Lee", is a stark, haunting song, that as Mr. Gegenhuber points out, evokes Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." It's a hymn for the lost; it echos what probably goes through so many minds when we hear about a murdered child: Why, God?

Most of the songs covered on this blog are sung from the murder's perspective.  People are fascinated not only with what might go on in the mind of a murder, but with violence in general.

There another side to murders of course, the victims.  But one thing about fictional songs, is that since the people in it aren't real, we don't really have to think about the pain and the sorrow that the violent death of someone's loved one causes.

The beautiful, "Georgia Lee" reminds us of that.