[punkrockmonday #20] Mance Lipscomb- Ella Speed

There are at least four types of murder ballads depending upon: (1) whether the narrator is the murderer, and (2) whether the murderer or victim is the tragic and/or heroic figure in the song. I realize that (2) sounds perverse, but it really is not give the oppression experienced by the original audiences of so much great folk art. For examples, see all of the myriad versions of Henry Lee, Stagger Lee, Frankie and Johny, and Johnny Hart.

Mance Lipscomb's version of Ella Speed interests me for a few different reasons:

In particular, I'm obsessed with the anxiety of influence in good popular music. This version clearly inspired two other great songs, and is also sui generis in a couple of other ways.

First, the mathematics of the chord progression is very weird for a blues song (first, fourth, minor seventh, minor third (the chords on the seventh and minor third not being minor chords themselves but sevenths)), but the Paul McCartney clearly recognized it as canonical and straight up lifted it for "Rocky Raccoon."  Second, as far as I know this is the earliest  version of a murder ballad with the "first time I shot her" trope, which Johny Cash used to such disturbing effect in his first late period murder ballad "Delia's Gone" (also cf. the arguably more disturbing "I Hung My Head" from his last album). Cash, of course has used Leadbelly material before (e.g. "I got stripes. . .), and Leadbelly did an earlier murder ballad about Ella Speed (who was almost certainly a New Orleans prostitute), but Leadbelly's version is not sung in first person. As far as I can tell, none of the original versions (played by prisoners early in the previous century) were. Third, Lipscomb's version have two other by now standard lyrical tropes that aren't in other versions, (1) the lyric "it's hard // but it's true // you can love someone // who don't love you" which Son House put in some versions of his masterpiece "Death Letter Blues" (for a better performance without the Lipscomb lyrics go HERE; one of the most haunting performances of any song ever), (2) Ella Speed's admonition in the end of Lipscomb's version is isomorphic to the prostitutes admonition at the end of House of the Rising Sun (and if you can listen to Woody Guthrie's version without getting goosebumps you are lacking in wisdom). I don't know who influenced who here. . . Fourth, Lipscomb's song is incredibly strange in this respect. In most of the songs where the narrator is the murderer the song returns to how the narrator's whole life has been ruined by the act, but in Lipscomb's song if you listened to the all of the verses except the first one, you'd have no idea that the murderer was the narrator. Instead of lamenting his impending execution or his own haunted soul, Lipscomb immediately just sings about how the victim just loved too much. It actually becomes narratively incoherent halfway in, because at 1:34 he says "they shot Ella" and states that she was shot once and not any more, directly contradicting the first verse (the one lifted by Johnny Cash). Fifth, there's a whole genre of songs involving New Orleans and pretty horrific despair ("Baby Please Don't Go," "House of the Rising Sun," "Saint James Infirmary," "When the Levee Breaks," etc. etc. etc.). As far as I can tell, whenever one of these songs gets popular enough, it then gets is covered in an aesthetically perverse way, a way that guts the song of all of its original despair. And the crappy cover ends up being more popular. I don't know if this is anything nefarious, or just something about the nature of tragic art. I don't know where Lipscomb's version sits on this continuum. . . his version sounds ten times sadder than Leadbelly's, but Leadbelly was very badly served by Alan Lomax at times so I don't know who was responsible for the production.

1. [Punkrockmonday #1] The White Stripes - Jack the Ripper (orig. Screaming Lord Sutch), Black Math, and the Big Three Killed My Baby]
2. [Punkrockmonday #2] Roy Cook - Saint Paul Cathedral, Minneapolis Capitol Building, Aayla Secura Mosaic, and Firefly Class Spaceship
3. [Punkrockmonday #3] El Général- Rais Le Bled (President, Your Country)
4. [Punkrockmonday #4] Charlie Patton -High Water Everywhere, Part 2
5. [Punkrockmonday #5] Henry Rollins- What Am I Doing Here; Willie Nelson- Me and Paul; Rainbow Connection (orig. Kermit the Frog)
6. [Punkrockmonday #6] Philip Larkin - Church Going
7. [Punkrockmonday #7] David Bowie - Time
8. [Punkrockmonday #8] P.J. Harvey - When Under Ether; White Chalk; Broken Harp
9. [Punkrockmonday #9] Allison Kraus and Robert Plant - When the Levee Breaks (orig. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie)
10. [Punkrockmonday #10] Doog - Famous Blue Raincoat (orig. Leonard Cohen); sElf - Back in Black (orig. AC/DC); Johnny Cash- Down There By the Train (orig. Tom Waits)
11. [Punkrockmonday #11] John Lee Hooker - Hobo Blues; Weird Al Yankovic - My Sharona; Edgar Cruz - Bohemian Rhapsody
12. [punkrockmonday #12] Pixar Studios - Cars 2; The Bang Bang - Sitting in a Car; Angry Samoans - Hot Cars; Black Flag - Drinking and Driving; Gary Numan - Cars; Queen - Bicycle Race
13. [punkrockmonday #13] Betty Bowers - Betty Bowers Explains Traditional Marriage to Everyone Else
14. [punkrockmonday #14] Sesame Street - Sure Shot (orig. Beastie Boys)
15. [punkrockmonday #15] Neil Degrasse Tyson - Stupid Design
16. [punkrockmonday # 16] C.M. Punk - run up to Money in the Bank victory
17. [punkrockmonday #17] Dead Kennedys - Riot
18. [punkrockmonday # 18] Cookie Monster - God's Away on Business (orig. Tom Waits)
19. [punkrockmonday # 19] The Legendary K.O.- George Bush Don’t Like Black People