DID I REALLY SAY "DEAD BABY MUSIC" YOU ASK? YES, I DID!
Growing up in
Eastern Kentucky in the 1950's & 1960's I listened to a lot of
bluegrass & classic country music primarily because that was what most of
the people around me listened to and most of the radio stations I could pick up
also played it daily. But I also loved
the music in all its manifestations. As
I became a hippie in the late 1960's, I ceased to listen to bluegrass and
country for several years and listened primarily to rock and folk until about
the middle 1970's. At about that time, I
returned to the music of my childhood and have listened to it nearly every day
of my life since. I generally prefer
bluegrass over most other forms of music but do still periodically listen to
classic rock, folk, blues, classical, jazz, and zydeco. But, when I want to feel at peace, at home,
comfortable and rested, I listen to bluegrass.
My favorite musicians include the Stanley Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs,
Reno & Smiley, Bill Monroe, Dailey & Vincent, the Carter Family, Tom T.
Hall, Doc Watson, Area Code 615, Dale McCoury, Ricky Skaggs, Dolly Parton,
Clarence Kelly, Patty Loveless, Don Rigsby, and Larry Cordle. Nearly every one of these people is an above
average musician and there are some of the best songwriters in America in this
group. Nearly every one of them has
written and/or recorded at least one American classic song which has woven its
way into the hearts of the general public.
Several of them such as Bill Monroe, Tom T. Hall, Ricky Skaggs, Flatt
& Scruggs, Dolly Parton, and Larry Cordle have written and recorded several
such songs.
Bluegrass music is the music of the Appalachian
working class, the poor, the disenfranchised, and many of the people in the
country who seek to move upward from an economic or social condition which they
do not wish to live in for the rest of their lives. Bluegrass music shares these qualities with
both country music and rap. Like country music, bluegrass has commonly heard
themes of love, drinking, unrequited love, cheating, home & family, hard
work, prison, Christianity, and love of place, an Appalachian Value I have
discussed at length in several other posts. Bluegrass also shares several of
these themes with rap and at some time in the future, I will also write a post
about common themes in bluegrass and rap.
But for now, my topic is a sub-genre of bluegrass music which I have
always referred to as Dead Baby Music. And I have to give credit for the name
Dead Baby Music to my wife Candice, a transplanted Wisconsin native, who first
heard bluegrass with every negative opinion possible and has since come to know
and love it. I have searched for a
slightly less off putting name for this type of music and to be honest, I
cannot find one that is more accurate or more appropriately descriptive of the
music I am discussing. What I mean by
Dead Baby Music is music which almost always has a central character, usually a
child, who dies an untimely and often painful or cruel death. In some of these songs, that death may have
even come at the hands of a parent, family member or friend.
The three best examples of Dead Baby Music I can think
of are "Little Bessie" written by Bill Emerson, Doyle Lawson, &
Charley Waller, "Bringing Mary Home" written by Red Sovine, and
"The Water Lily" written by Tom T. Hall. "Little Bessie" is
an absolute classic which has been recorded by hundreds of bluegrass artists
but the two best versions are by Ralph Stanley and Ricky Skaggs. Skaggs recorded a version which is nearly 14
minutes long and is timeless in its musical skill & heart wrenching vocals. In the song, Little Bessie, a terminally ill
child tells her mother of a dream or vision in which "a window opened on a
field of lambs and sheep. Some far out in a brook were drinking. Some were lying fast asleep." The next stanza describes "a world that
was filled with little children and they seemed so happy there." These clearly Christian symbols of pairing
children with lambs lead into the next stanza in which Bessie asks if the
Savior "saw me would he speak to such as me". Bessie does go on to describe a
conversation with Jesus in the next two stanzas in which he tells her
"come up here my Little Bessie. Come up here and live with me". Then the poor sick child tells her mother
that she had just been getting ready to go when the mother called and she
proceeds to tell her mother goodbye.
"Oh to sleep and never suffer Mother don't be crying so" is a
request by the child for permission to die.
At this point, the "mother pressed her closer to her own dear
burdened breast. On the heart so near its breaking lay the heart so near its
rest". And naturally, Little
Bessie must die and go to join Jesus as the final stanza says "at the
solemn hour of midnight in the darkness calm and deep lying on her mother's
bosom Little Bessie fell asleep".
That is Dead Baby Music at its finest.
"Little Bessie" personifies nearly everything that Dead Baby
Music is. It is played by thousands of bluegrass musicians ranging from the
great to the miserably ordinary. It is a
crowd favorite at bluegrass concerts and festivals and will continue to be so
long as bluegrass music is played in public.
Tom T. Hall, one of America's greatest living
songwriters, with a portfolio of classics to his credit also wrote one of the
finest pieces of Dead Baby Music when he penned "The Water Lily"
which is best heard on the Hall & Stanley duet on Ralph Stanley's
"Saturday Night, Sunday Morning" recordings. The song also begins with a dream, another
common element in Dead Baby Music. But
this time, the mother is dreaming "of a lily decked pool with a border of
ferns and a beautiful child with butterfly wings trips down to the edge of the
water and sings." Hall has probably
consciously reversed some of the best elements of the earlier classic by having
the mother dream and the child beckoning from the dreamland asking the mother
to come. But he has also consciously
kept the elements of the dream, the mother, the child, and the water. Tom T. Hall did not become the unequaled
songwriter he is accidentally. He has studied and written both novels and short
stories. His public nickname has for
many years been the Story Teller. During
the time he worked as a regularly touring musician, his band was known as the Story
Tellers. And in the story of "The
Water Lily", he has woven one of his finest and one of the favorites of
all followers of Dead Baby Music. The
lyrics of the song are woven together by the chorus of the child with butterfly
wings singing to her mother "come mother, come quick follow me. Step out
on the leaves of the water lily."
And, naturally, the mother attempts to join the beckoning child
"but the lily leaves sink and she wakes from her dream". And of course, the writer and the mother let
us all know the inevitable for "waking is sad for the tears that it brings
and she knows it is her dead baby's spirit that sings". There is no finer example of Dead Baby Music
in the world today. Hall kept the best
themes from "Little Bessie" but reversed the position of the mother
and child. He has the child already dead
and begging her mother who is unable to comply to come and join her. But, like "Little Bessie" we still
have the grieving mother left behind by the dead child.
Red Sovine used a different approach but achieved an
equally touching effect with "Bringing Mary Home". The song begins with a narrator stopping in
the night to pick up a small girl from the side of the road. The child climbs into the car and tells the
narrator "my name is Mary please won't you take me home." And the narrator goes on to give us a
touching physical description of the little girl. "She must have been so frightened all
alone there in the night. There was
something strange about her cause her face was deathly white." Here we also see another common theme in Dead
Baby Music with white symbolizing purity as it has in literature for hundreds
of years. Then the narrator and driver
takes the little girl to the house where she asks him to go and when he gets
out to open the car door for her "I
just could not believe my eyes the back seat was bare. I looked all around the car but Mary wasn't
there." And finally, Sovine brings the mother into the song with these
words " A small light shown from the porch a woman opened up the door. I
asked about the little girl that I was looking for. Then the lady gently smiled
and brushed a tear away. She said it sure was nice of you to go out of your
way. But thirteen years ago today in a wreck just down the road our darling
Mary lost her life and we miss her so."
This time the mother is providing the consolation for the innocent
stranger who has just happened to become an element in the child's quest to
return to the home and grieving mother."
And then we reach the somewhat surprising and chilling end of the song
when the mother tells the man "so
thank you for your trouble and the kindness you have shown. You're the thirteenth one who's been here
bringing Mary home." At this point,
it is not uncommon to see tears in an audience when a good singer and band
deliver that line.
Dolly Parton has also written and recorded some of the
finest Dead Baby Music I have ever heard.
She, too, is one of America's finest song writers with more than a few
classic songs to her credit in the fields of country, pop, and bluegrass. But her best Dead Baby Music is rarely heard
outside the world of bluegrass. On her
classic bluegrass CD "Little Sparrow", Parton actually recorded two
fine examples of Dead Baby Music,
"Mountain Angel" and "Down From Dover". Parton did some of her best writing in
"Mountain Angel". It is a song
about a girl who was born as close to perfect as it is possible to be.
"Skin as fair as lily's. Hair as golden as the corn. She was her momma's
baby. She was her Daddy's pride."
And then a man enters the picture and changes everything in this woman's
life. He gets her pregnant and
disappears before the child is born.
"They say she had a baby.
Some say that it had died. They
say it's just as well as it had been the devil's child". And now the grief-stricken mother disappears
"into the wild". The most
powerful lyrics in the song come in the last couple of stanzas. "She waited for him as her beauty faded.
Her parents died from grief before their time." Not only has the tragedy
consumed the mother of the dead baby in this song, it has also consumed the grandparents
as well. And like the other mothers in
the other examples, this mother tries to deal with her grief but cannot.
"She tried to gather pieces of her life, they wouldn't fit. Beside the
tiny grave deep in the woods is where she'd sit. Talking to the child, herself,
to him, who knew for sure. Possessed they say by Satan's insane
lure." At this point in the song,
she has now completely lost her mind and become an outcast "high a'top the
mountain" And that is how she lives
out her life roaming the mountains, grieving for the dead child and the man who
ruined her. Parton takes her out into the hills and leaves her for all eternity
where "for years they say she's seen. Looking down upon the town where she
had once been queen. She'd sneak around the playground, watch the little
children play. They'd see the crazy lady then run away. They say she roamed
these hills for years, wearing not a stitch. The lovely mountain angel now
thought to be a witch."
Parton also narrowly misses the genre of Dead Baby Music
in another of her songs, "These Old Bones" from the "Halos And
Horns" CD. In that song, she tells
a story of witchcraft or clairvoyance about another woman who lives alone in
the mountains with her bag of bones, a dog, a cat, and a goat. The narrator turns out to be a daughter of
the woman which "the country took you from me said I wasn't right in my
mind." But this child lives to find
the mother and takes care of her, burying her, and assuming her position of
telling fortunes and living in the mountain with "These Old Bones".
In the other example of Dead Baby Music on the
"Little Sparrow" CD, Parton writes about another young girl who has
become pregnant by a man who deserts her.
But this girl leaves her family and home and goes to take "care of
that old lady" as a way to have a home away from her family who have
ostracized her. As childbirth gets
closer, she keeps repeating the chorus line "I know he'll be coming down
from Dover." But the girl delivers
the child still born and sings "dying was her way of telling me he wasn't
coming down from Dover". All the
songs I have discussed here are fine examples of Dead Baby Music. They share several common elements. There are many more in bluegrass which fit
the genre. They are part of what makes bluegrass
unique and wonderful. Rarely would
anyone wish to listen to these songs all day long. But when you mix them in among the other
standard bluegrass themes of love, work, prison, heartbreak, and religion, they
are well worth paying attention to and accepting as a treasured part of the
bluegrass music many of us will love to our dying day.
