Murder Ballads are an old European narrative form. They’re little poems that follow the ballad form (alternating rhyming lines of four iambs and three iambs) and tell the story of a murder using a rigidly-defined structure:

1. We introduce the characters, who always have an intimate relationship (parent-child, siblings, lovers, etc).
2. Someone starts murdering people.
3. The payoff.

The payoff is the part where creativity is allowed — there’s lots of variation. The murderer can get away, so that it’s a tragedy to society, or can discover extra information that makes the story tragic to them. In “morality play” versions, usually the ones that are based on true stories, the killer goes to jail or is executed. Sometimes there’s revenge from beyond the grave.

In the very best the narrator is revealed as unreliable, or deluded somehow. There’s a poem somewhere in my ocean of open tabs that sneaks up on you. At first it seems as though it’s not a murder ballad, just someone singing about his wife bringing him dinner. Then in the last stanza you realize she’s poisoning him.

Here’s an example of — I was going to say “of an oldie”, but they’re all oldies — Sam Cooke singing “Frankie and Johnny”:

The structure is so immutable and yet so versatile that poets could use murder ballads to tell stories of actual killings and could create tales of supernatural terror with little more effort than swapping out a couple of verses. God bless pronouns.

Some don’t even need that small amount of effort, some just change names. The most common ballad is:

1. Man invites woman to a pool in the woods to propose to her.
2. Man drowns woman when she says no.
3. Man is caught and executed.

I’ve seen that told as a general horror/tragedy story, as a true story, and as a supernatural story. It’s ridiculously common. Recording the ballads seems to have done them a great disservice: they’re a European oral tradition that thrives in the remix. Writing down a specific configuration of the replaceable, interchangeable parts entirely misses the point and leads to a combinatorial explosion of unnecessary documentation. Fucking modernists.