Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender

The concept of "love matches", marrying someone because you're both in L-O-V-E is a fairly modern one.  For many years marriages were arranged to increase wealth, or social standing.  They were formed to forge alliances between families and countries. 1  No one married for love.  That doesn't mean that poets, musicians and writers were unaware of the concept of love.  They wrote and sung of lovers all the time, and often of the tragic results.  One of these tales is "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender" (or Ellinor/Eleanor/Ellendry) which tells of a love triangle that ends with three bodies dead on the floor.

Like many old ballads, lyrics vary, but I'll be using the version found in Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie as my primary source.

The tale begins with Lord Thomas posing a question to his mother:

Oh mother, oh mother, come riddle it down
Come riddle two hearts as one
Say must I marry fair Ellender 
Or bring the brown girl home? 2

 It should be noted that "brown" in this song more than likely suggests a olive or tanned complexion.  Up until the 20th century, fair or light skin was associated with wealth, while darker skin was associated with those of a lower class, meaning, people who had to work outside in the sun. 3 

The mother, when posed with the question of who Lord Thomas should take for a wife responds with cruel common sense.  Marrying a woman of wealth will not only benefit Lord Thomas, but his family:

The brown girl
She has houses and land
Fair Ellender she has none
So the best advice I can give you my son
Is bring me the brown girl home 4

Before going off to find the wealthy brown girl.  Lord Thomas decides to break the news to his pale, rosy cheeked, beloved:

I come to ask you to my wedding
Now what do you think of me? 5

Lady Ellender, distraught asks her mother:

Oh mother, oh mother, come riddle it down
Come riddle two hearts as one
Oh must I go to Lord Thomas' wedding
or stay at home and mourn? 6


Ellender's mother, wisely tells her:

Oh, the brown girl she's got buissness there
You know you have got none
So the best advice I can give you my daughter
Is to stay at home and mourn. 7


Of course, the fair skinned, beautiful maid doesn't listen.  Instead she pulls a stunt that would probably fit right with in with a bad chick flick:

She dressed herself in a snow white gown
Her maids they dressed in green
And every town that they road through
They took her to be some queen. 8

 While the wearing of a white dress to a wedding didn't hold the same meaning then as it does now 9,  dressing like a "queen" is still an insult. Not only does Ellender arrive at the wedding, but Lord Thomas brings her in and sits her down in a place of honor.  So Ellender, dressed in her finest clothes, sitting among the guests decides to humiliate the brown girl by proclaiming.

Is this your bride, Lord Thomas? She cried.
She looks so wonderful brown. 10

Keep in mind, brown, tanned skin was associated with poverty.  Ellender is not simply calling the bride ugly; she saying that despite her wealth she looks poor, she looks "low class".

Lord Thomas doesn't try to defend his new wife.  Instead he proclaims his love for Ellender, and proceeds to heap a few more insults upon the brown girl:

Dispraise her not, fair Ellender, he 
cried
Dispraise her not to me
For I think more of your little finger,
Than of her whole body 11

Now, I hope I'm not the only one who feels some sympathy for the brown girl here.  Her only crime was saying yes to a man who was only interested in her wealth.  Not only does she have to deal with some wedding crashing bimbo calling her ugly, but she has to deal with her brand new husband agreeing with the girl.

I also hope I'm not the only one who takes some satisfaction at the brown girl's response.

The brown girl had a little pen 
knife,
It being both keen and sharp
Betwixt the long ribs and the 
short,
Pierced fair Ellender to the heart 12

Got to love a girl who always carries a knife with her.  You know, just in case.

 Naturally, Lord Thomas responds to the death of Ellender in a rational manner:

Lord Thomas he drew his sword from
his side
As he run through the hall;
He cut off the head of his bonny
brown bride
And kicked it against the wall 13

Ponder that image.  Just take a moment and ponder that slightly hysterical image.

Another version, found in Olive Arnold Campbell's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is even more graphic:

Lord Thomas had a sword by his side
With a blade both keen and sharp
He cut this brown girl's head smooth off
And cleaved the body apart 14

After dispatching the brown girl Lord Thomas impales himself with his own sword.  His final words are this plea:

Oh mother, oh mother 
And dig it both wide and deep
And bury fair Ellender in my arms
And the brown girl at my feet 15

Now that's what I call an entertaining wedding.

Most versions seem to side with Thomas and Ellender; this one which can be found here even invokes the "rose and briar" motif.16  But, if you do side with the brown girl,  you can take comfort in this ending, found in Olive Campbell's book, in which the living decide to deliver an eternal insult to the dead lovers:

Go dig my grave both wide and deep
and paint my coffin black
And bury fair Ellendry in my arms,
The brown girl at my back

The dug his grave both wide and deep
And painted his coffin black,
And buried the brown girl in his arms
And fair Ellendry at his back 17

 While not all the Child Ballads end like "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender", anyone who takes the time to read a collection of them will quickly notice that most ballads concerning young lovers don't end well.  Why didn't Lord Thomas ignore his mother and bring Ellender home?  Why couldn't have they rode off into the sunset?  As romantic as the tale of Ellender and Thomas might have been to some, what they did violated the norms of the time. Passionate love, did not a marriage make:

.  . . the social order rests entirely on marriage and because marriage is an institution, a legal system which unites, alienates and imposes obligations ensuring  the continuity of of social structures, particularly the stability of power and wealth.  It is not fitting that marriage should embrace frivolity, passion, fantasy and pleasure[.] 18
- Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages

 To allow them to live happily ever after, would also mean condoning such behavior.  Killing them off allowed musicians to sing of romantic love, but keep the social order intact.

Or maybe people enjoyed a blood splattered tale then as much as the do now.




---------

1. Duby, Georges. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. trans Jane Dunett. The University of Chicago Press. 1994. pg 3

2. Ritchie, Jean. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender".  Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians. University of Kentucky Press, 1997.

3. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/03/01/249992.htm?site=science/greatmomentsinscience

4. Ritchie, Jean. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender"

5. ibid

6. ibid

7. ibid

8. ibid

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_wedding

10.  Ritchie, Jean. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender"

11. ibid

12. ibid

13. ibid

14. Campbell, Olive Arnold. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor" (version B).  English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York, The Knickerbocker Press, 1917.  Reprint, Forgotten Books, 2012.

15. Ritchie, Jean. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellender"

16.  "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor". http://www.contemplator.com/child/thomas.html

17.  Campbell, Olive Arnold. "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor" (version A).  English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York, The Knickerbocker Press, 1917.  Reprint, Forgotten Books, 2012.

18.  Duby, Georges. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. trans Jane Dunett. The University of Chicago Press. 1994. pg 32

Strange Fruit

"That is about the ugliest song I have ever heard, ugly in the sense that it is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country." 

-  Nina Simone (1)

Suffering and art have an uneasy balance. While humanity often dreams of eliminating the horrors of war, death, disease and violence, it is hard to deny that those very things have inspired great works of art.  The bombings of the city of Basque inspired Picasso's Guernica (2).  Angels in America sprung from the AIDS crisis.  And the lynchings in the American South inspired the protest song, Strange Fruit.

 In 1871,  in response to restoration, and the lost in the Civil War (3) "whites roamed the countryside, hunting and lynching Negros"(4). This started a legacy that lasted into the 1960's.  An act of homegrown terrorism "[l]ynching a black man taught other black men to say in their places at the bottom of the economic ladder."(5)  Criminals, murders where never punished and remained free to brutalize black Americans at will.

It was this violence that led Jewish academic Abel Meeropol to write the poem Bitter Fruit, which first ran in the union backed which first ran in the New York Teacher in 1937.  When he latter it adapted Bitter Fruit to music, became Strange Fruit (6)(7).  Writer Dorian Lynskey calls this name change "inspired" saying that it "It puts the listener in the shoes of a curious observer spying the hanging shapes from afar and moving closer towards a sickening realization"(8).  The idyllic myth of sleepy plantations, sweet tea, and southern belles crumbles to reveal decay.

While she did not write and others have recorded it (including singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone),  it is Billie Holiday who is forever linked with Strange Fruit:

'Strange Fruit' was a landmark recording but of a very different kind that was perceived at the time. It was one of first examples of a popular song becoming impossible to disentangle from a single, specific recording  of it. (9)

This is with good reason; listen to the way she sings "pastoral scenes of the gallant south."(10)  The way anger undercuts the sweetness of her voice.  Much like the magnolias in the song, she lures you in for a closer look, and then makes your blood run cold.

Strange Fruit remains a beautiful, yet ugly testimony to the horrors that men do.


-----

Strange Fruit live:



Nina Simone's version: ---------
1.  Lynskey, Dorian.  33 Revolutions Per Mintue: A History of Protest Songs From Billie Holiday to Green Day.  Harper Collins, New York. 2011

2. Cohen, David.  Hidden Tresures: What's So Controversial About Picasso's Gurnica? Slate Magazine: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/2003/02/hidden_treasures.html 2003.

3. Watson, Bruce. Freedom Summer.  Penguin Group, New York. 2010

4. Ibid

5.  Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie. The Radical Roots of Civil Rights: 1919 - 1950.  WW Norton & Company, New York. 2008

6.  Thomson, Graeme.  I Shot a Man In Reno: A History of Death By Murder, Suicide, Fire, Floor, Murder, Drugs, Disease and General Misadventure As Related in Popular Song. Continuum, New York. 2008

7.  Lynskey, Dorian.  33 Revolutions Per Mintue

8. Ibid

9.  Nicholson, Stuart.  Billie Holiday.  Northeastern University Press, Boston. 1995

10. Meeropol, Abel. Strange Fruit.


--------

Yet Another Look: Stagger Lee

I know you're all probably getting tired of old Stagger Lee but . . . this blew me away:

The Collins Kids. Larry and Lorrie.  Larry is probably around twelve or thirteen here. All the little teenyboppers of today ain't got nothing on this kid.  Lorrie is pretty stellar as well.

This has nothing to do with murder but here's another one of their songs:

Larry went on to write such songs as  Delta Dawn and You're The Reason God Made Oklahoma (1).  Not bad.

------------

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collins_Kids

Day of Rest: I Want Jesus to Talk With Me

As I type this, Sunday is about ten minutes away from being over. I hope that everyone had a good one.  I also hope you enjoy Homer Quincy Smith's 1926 recording of I Want Jesus to Talk With Me.  





If you're interested in this song, it can be found here.

The Lonely Grave of Virginia Rappe

While I was in LA this summer, I made a point to visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  One of the graves I wanted to check out was the grave of Virginia Rappe.

Who was Virginia Rappe?:

She was a actress in silent films in the late 1910's in early 1920's.  If you haven't heard of her, don't worry she never "made it".  Most of her films roles were bit parts, and many of those films no longer exist.

The details of her life are pretty sketchy.  Biographies of her are a mixture of sordid facts and sordid rumors.  Multiple abortions, venereal disease, children given up for adoption, spiked with lots of nudity and alcoholism.

On September 5th, 1921 she attended a party at the St. Francis Hotel suite of legendary actor Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.  At some point during the party, she became ill.

Four days later she was dead.

An acquaintance of Rappe's  accused Fatty of sexually assaulting the actress and causing the injuries that let to her death.   After three separate trials, Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, but the scandal ruined his career.

Here's her grave:

That some jackass stuck stickers all over

It's almost being over taken by a tree.  Her fiance Henry Lehrman is buried one grave over:

That's it.

Douglas Fairbanks' grave is also close by:

If you wish to read more about the "Fatty Arbuckle Scandal", you can check out these links:

"Fatty Arbuckle and Hollywood's First Scandal"

Fatty Arbuckle and the Death of Virginia Rappe

El Paso

Songwriter and singer Marty Robbins, a native of Arizona and one of ten children, grew up listening to his maternal grandfather tell stories of the west. (1)  This obviously had a profound impact, which can be heard on the, 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, and the track El Paso. 

In what writer James Miller calls "the last great cowboy ballad" (2), Marty Robbins sings of love, a wicked woman, obsession, vengeance and western justice.  Released in 1959, El Paso is a mini-movie set to music, an "essentially aural version of cowboy b-movies that were so popular at the time." (3) It's a tribute to an American west, not of fact, but of Hollywood dreams.

 The west presented to us in El Paso is "a dangerous place of large passions and empty violence, where death and eros an intertwined." (4)  Moral ambiguity does not exist here.  Laws of conduct are set in stone, and those that break those laws are punished.

Light! Camera! Action!

The narrator "[falls] in love with a Mexican girl" (5) by the name of Felina (or Feleena), and spends the night in the local cantina watching this beautiful girl with "eyes blacker than night"(6) dance.  We've seen her before, the wicked woman "casting [her] spell"(7), and rendering men powerless.  In other songs, such as She's Making Whoopie in Hell, her "spell" is so powerful that the decision is made to kill her in order to break it.  But in El Paso, she prompts a man to murder for the love of her.

The "hero" of our story, discovers his love, his obsession, drinking with a "wild young cowboy" (8).  Overcome with anger and jealousy he challenges the man to a showdown:

My challenge was answered in less than a heartbeat
the handsome young stranger lay dead on the floor (9)

Unlike so many songs, the killer is no nihilistic psychopath, for right after the killing he's shocked by his "foul evil deed" (10) .  Remorse doesn't stop him from stealing a horse and galloping off into the desert.  No judge's gavel need fall for him to know his fate if he stays: his sentence is death.

Yet his love for Felina overwhelms him.  The desert, for all it's dangers is nothing compared to missing her.  Seeing her again is worth dying for, and he knows that he will die.  Women are dangerous creatures, men will not only kill for them, but against all reason, they will die for them. So still in the grips of her spell, the killer rides back to El Paso

When he gets there, he finds a posse of cowboys waiting for him, dashing any hopes the listener may have had for earthly redemption.  It was a foolish hope: a crime of passion or not,  El Paso is still "the staunch tale of a man who kills another and must return to the scene of the crime to take his punishment" (11).  This is the west, and justice must prevail:

I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle 
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest (12) 

Yet death is worth it, because, before he leaves this world, he winds up in sweet Felina's arms.

One little kiss and Felina
Goodbye (13)

A man's dying wish is granted, and the law of the gun still stands.  Everything fades to black and the credits roll.


-----------------------------------------------
1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_Robbins 
2. Miller, James. "El Paso", The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in The American Ballad. ed Marcus, Griel. Wilentz, Sean. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company 2006)
3. Thomson, Graeme.  I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, Disease and General Misadventure as Related in Popular Song.  (New York: Continuum, 2008)
4. Miller, James. "El Paso" The Rose and the Briar 
5. Marty Robbins, "El Paso", Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, 1959.
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9.  Ibid
10. Ibid
11. Thomson, Graeme.  I Shot a Man in Reno
12. Marty Robbins, "El Paso".
13. Ibid   

Quote of the Week

“He can neither read nor write and in him already there broods a taste for mindless violence.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian