@tc_morekindness That's an interesting question!
Traditional murder ballads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_ballad) used to be popular material for the folk and country singers, and quite a few of them were recorded even in the 1950s. I was actually thinking about mentioning "Knoxville Girl", which goes even farther back in time, but I couldn't quite decide whether to pick one of the 1950s recordings - the Wilburn Brothers or the Louvin Brothers - or an earlier 1930s version by the Blue Sky Boys. So I ended up with "Down In the Willow Garden" instead.
Don and Phil Everly recorded the classic concept album "Songs Our Daddy Taught Us" in August, 1958. They had started out as part of a family group with their parents, performing country & western music. The idea of the album was to record traditional folk songs that had been introduced to them by their father, Ike Everly, who was a relatively well-known and influential guitar picker.
This was clearly something that they wanted to do, not something that was done because of commercial motivations. The brothers were probably aware that there was a folk music boom going on among the college students, and that may explain why they got the go-ahead to do the album from their record company, Cadence Records. The Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley", another murder ballad (although a much more up-beat performance), was about to hit the top of the charts, but that was only later in the fall.
The new Everly Brothers biography by Barry Mazor, "Blood Harmony. The Everly Brothers Story" (2025), points out that their approach differs from the way the artists that were part of the commercial folk boom interpreted these songs:
"In the Everly's hands they're performed charmingly and involvingly, without the sing-along distancing or irony commonplace in the era's commercial 'frat house' folk."
However, Mazor goes on to note that the brothers were actually aware of the incongruities of trying to match these songs for their own audience:
"By about the twelfth take on 'Willow Garden,' the brothers and [the bass player] Lightnin' [Chance] broke the tension with some revealing joking. Don, apparently pondering the lyric that they've been singing over and over for the first time, with both a knifing and a poisoning in it, wonders, 'It hardly makes sense ... I killed her _twice_? Now, friends - we bring you a killing song. In two easy lessons you can slay your pregnant girlfriend. Well ... that's what the story's about!' And Phil adds a final folk-album style explanatory intro, not to be included on the actual record: 'Music to kill by, for all you teenagers.'"
#music #TuneTuesday #MyGoldenOldie #murderballads #everlybrothers #doneverly #phileverly #folkmusic #roseconnelly #knoxvillegirl #tomdooley #ikeeverly
