Themed Set: The Ballad
July 5th, 2009 Headsman
The ballad and the scaffold go together like Jack and Ketch.
Narrative popular poetry, the ballad lyricizes precisely the sort of public spectacle and collective drama that brings the crowds to Tyburn. And with identifiable sub-genres like the murder ballad and the outlaw ballad, it only stands to reason that there’d be hanging ballads too.
It’s such a perfect marriage that balladeers hardly feel constrained to wait on flesh-and-blood hangings for inspiration but readily memorialize (frequently in the first-person voice of the doomed) a fictional, idealized crime where all the pathos and tragedy can be arranged just so.
Of course, it’s also the artist’s prerogative to just fictionalize real-life source material.
“Sam Hall,” for instance, was adapted in the mid-19th century from a ballad about the 1707 hanging of Jack Hall — finding in common between these two very different times “the social need to believe that it was possible to face death with such insouciance.”
If not all such rise to the literary level of, say, “The Ballad of the Hanged Man,” ballads’ demonstrable popular appeal has made them the metrical vehicle of choice for the crime du jour. Naturally, when the ballad opera conquered the stage, its first subject was the gallows-bound criminal underworld.
Whether commemorating doomed revolutionaries or doomed criminals, the ballad remains a part of our collective memory-shaping to give we who remain behind purchase on the timelessness of those launched into eternity.
Join Executed Today as we explore a few ballad-worthy events in the rich history of the death penalty.
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July 5: Jean Livingston, Lady Waristoun
July 6: Francois Benjamin Courvoisier
July 7: Charles Thomas Wooldridge
July 8: William John Marchant
July 9: Rane Jonsen
On this day..
- 1945: Harold Pringle, the last Canadian military execution - 2020
- 2010: Akram al-Samawi - 2019
- 1530: Johnnie Armstrong, border reiver - 2018
- 1723: Thomas Athoe the Elder, and Thomas Athoe the Younger - 2017
- 1453: The garrison of Poucques, Jacques de Lalaing's cannonball killers - 2016
- 2007: Jafar Kiani, stoned - 2015
- 1731: Jose de Antequera, Paraguayan comunero rebel - 2014
- 1655: Grete Adrian, Ruethen witch - 2013
- 1691: Jack Collet, sacrilegious burglar - 2012
- 1983: Aleksandr Kravchenko, in Chikatilo's place - 2011
- 1917: Gasim, by Lawrence of Arabia - 2010
- 1600: Jean Livingston, Lady Waristoun - 2009
- 1947: Ding Mocun, not as hot a lay in real life - 2008
Entry Filed under: Themed Sets
Tags: ballads, bob dylan, marty robbins, sam hall, the ballad of donald white, they're hanging me tonight
the less Dylan sings about murderers the better. It was his song”Hurricane” that made me think this guy was innocent – was he heck!