The Philosophy of Murder Ballads

Why, why, why, Delilah?

What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?
What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?
No one can love her half as much as me
What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?

Love is a white room that cures every ill
The thicker the heart, the stronger the pill
What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?
I’m mad about her and she’s crazy for me.

They say she strangled Black Dougherty's cat
They say she strangled Black Dougherty's cat
But her calico bonnet looked nothing like that
What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?

And more that she bludgeoned her pa in his bed
And more that she bludgeoned her pa in his bed
But that could have been anyone wearing his head
What have they done to my Sweet Rosalie?

— Sweet Rosalie, American Murder Ballad

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Confession: it was me wearing his head Confession: in my darker moments, I like listening to murder ballads—traditional ballads, typically upbeat and rhythmic, that describe gruesome (and sometimes historically real) murders. In other respects, my music picks are fairly milquetoast (mopey indie love tracks, impressively fast piano solos, nostalgic folk music); the only other weird things I like are Vietnam-era songs written in support of the war, which I find endearing in a “cute that you thought that” kind of way, American Civil War music (much of which celebrates the wrong side, and rails against “Northern treachery”), and this one Mormon country song called Brother Brigham, Brother Young—a head-bopper if ever there was one, but one which abruptly becomes a head-bopper-stopper when it gets jarringly racist halfway through. But of the weird stuff, murder ballads are probably my go-to thing.

Songs, in general, are emotionally expressive: they express emotions—heartache, gaiety, moodiness—and cause their listeners to feel the same way. Conventionally, a song’s lyrics should match up with the emotional tenor of its music. Murder ballads cut the fingerprints off this convention, whack it several times with a cricket bat, and heave its bleeding body into the River Hudson. Their music tends to be upbeat; their lyrics are about violently killing people.

According to philosophers Laura Sizer and Eva Dadlez, this feature of murder ballads dumps two problems on the listener: the problem of affective dissonance, and the problem of cognitive dissonance. ‘Affect’ is another word for emotion. The problem of affective dissonance is the problem of psychologically reconciling the warring emotions—of upbeat gaiety and moral disgust—that murder ballads induce in their listener. Relatedly, the problem of cognitive dissonance is the problem of psychologically reconciling the clashing information (‘You should be happy; listen to this schmoozy tune!”, “There was a murder, you psycho, have some decorum and feel aggrieved!”) that murder ballads push on their listener.

As Dalez and Sizer note, there are three ways for listeners to resolve these emotional and cognitive tensions:

1. Ignore or downplay the music and attend to the lyrics.

2. Ignore or downplay the lyrics and attend to the music.

3. Attend to both and find a way to make sense of the tension. Perhaps, for example, the mismatch in affective tone draws the listener to deeper, more complex interpretations of song meaning.

As they argue—forcefully, in my view—most murder ballads encourage option 1. When we listen to violent lyrics over happy instrumentals, the instrumentals command our feelings more than the lyrics. As a result, we’re pulled to ignore or downplay the lyrics and attends to the music.

There isn’t a ton of research, apparently, on whether a song’s music commands our emotions more than its lyrics. But there is some research. As Dalez and Sizer explain:

Empirical literature examining the processing and effects of music versus lyrics in songs is relatively sparse and somewhat mixed in its foci and findings. For example, Stratton and Zalanowski (1994) looked at the effects of lyrics versus music on listener moods and found that lyrics had a stronger effect on mood than music. Of specific interest to us is that Stratton and Zalanowski explained their results as a listener’s need to resolve dissonance between pleasant music and unpleasant or depressing lyrics. They concluded that, “[t]he lyrics dominate the affective direction and the effort of fitting the music to the lyrics strengthens the emotion” (Stratton and Zalanowski, 1994, p. 182). However, Sousou (1997) criticized Stratton and Zalanowski for using relatively affectively neutral music. When she repeated the experiment with less ambiguous music, she found that music exerted the stronger influence. “[M]usic, not lyrics, had a more powerful influence in changing mood, which contradicts the conclusions reached by Stratton & Zalanowski… overall, music is more likely to influence mood when the music is less ambiguous, but lyrics may influence mood when music is ambiguous” (Sousou, 1997, p. 39).

Dalez and Sizer go on to cite a smattering of other studies in support of the claim that, when push comes to shove, a song’s music tends to nudge listeners towards the mood it expresses—more so than the accompanying lyrics.

Anecdotally, their view seems right to me. At least when listening casually, I tend to pay much more attention to a song’s music than to its lyrics. This explains why we often casually change the lyrics to songs we’ve misheard and don’t think to correct our mistake, even when the lyrics we’ve filled in are obvious nonsense. (One time, when I was a wee lad, my Dad asked me what my favourite hymn was from school chapel. I immediately responded, “Zinger Zanger!” Eventually, we realised the song I meant was Sing Hosanna—I’d been singing “Zinger Zanger!” to the King of Kings the whole time. (I didn’t stop singing it, either.))

Social settings, like school choirs, can make us even more attentive to a song’s music, over and above its lyrics. One of the most important murder ballads, (why, why, whyyyyyyy) Delilah by Tom Jones, is routinely sung by crowds of rugby fans during matches. The fans are typically unfazed by the lyrics, so caught up are they in the collective bellowing, even though most would never dream of being wife-killers.

More troublingly, though, the emotional and cognitive dissonance that murder ballads foist on their listeners can cast a ‘positive glow’ on the song’s lyrics. More troublingly still, when—as in Delilah—the song’s murderer sings in the first person, we might be tempted to imagine killing someone, and enjoy it!

Neither of these points make me want to stop listening, however. For one thing, it’s not clear that imaginatively enjoying a murder—at least for a brief spell—is wrong. It’s not clear what harm it could do, and it might help one understand the psychology of murders a bit better (for whatever that’s worth).

For another thing, it’s plenty possible to enjoy—or even sing along to—a murder ballad written in the first person, without imaginatively enjoying murder. You can just, like, not imagine yourself enjoying a murder. If you’re singing along, out loud, you can just treat the song like an atheist treats a Christmas Carol: sing it, yes, get into it, yes, but don’t believe the things your singing, or put yourself too deep in the music’s shoes.

There’s only one ethical worry about murder ballads that gives me any pause: namely, many murder ballads are about real murders with historical victims; but many paint said victims in an unfair light, or leave out important context. In such cases, there’s an argument to be made that gleefully singing a song about their murder, written from the perspective of their killer, is a practice that harms them—even after they’re dead.

To see why this might be so, consider the following chain of reasoning. Plausibly, it’s possible to inflict an unfelt harm on someone. That is: it’s possible to make someone worse off even without so much as impinging on their consciousness. (For example: it seems like a husband can harm his wife by cheating, even if she never finds out—what he did was bad, and bad for her.)

A reasonable account of this is that when you harm someone without them knowing about it, you do so by frustrating their desires—even if they never learn that their desires were frustrated. In the adultery example, the wife has a desire that her husband stay faithful; when he cheats, that desire of hers is frustrated.

But if unfelt harm consist in frustrating someone’s desires, then—presumably—you can harm dead people by singing slanderous songs about them, since (when they were alive) they desired that people not slander them, a desire that becomes frustrated when future people sing ballads about their murder.

I'm not sure if I think it’s possible to harm the dead. (David Boonin’s book Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm is apparently the best exploration of this issue, and discussed many of the objections you might already be thinking of.) But I find the possibility real enough that learning the true story behind a murder ballad is enough to make me move on to something else, for fear that I might enjoy it.