Given folk music’s centuries-long fixation with homicide, the term ‘murder folk’ is almost a tautology. Indeed, the shadow of death and the gallows pole hangs over far more of the songs passed down from generation to generation than those illuminated by a spring morn or the love of a fair, bonny maid.
For all the piety of the pilgrim fathers, when they travelled across the Atlantic from the old world to the new, those dark songs followed them.
Via campfire and hearth-side recitals, these bloody tales found their way into Appalachian folk, bluegrass, country and blues, and when rock’n’roll sprang forth from that crucible, their stories and characters were at hand for those who wanted something a little more grown-up to sing about than hot rods and sweet little sixteen-year-olds.
During the ‘60s folk revival, lyrics that featured a good bludgeoning could be heard echoing from the coffee bars of Bleecker and MacDougal Street alongside dustbowl ballads and songs of freedom.
When rock, folk – and folk rock, for that matter – moved on to more personal, political and abstract subjects, it was country where you’d most likely find a killing yarn set to music. You might not consider Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues a murder ballad in the traditional sense, but surely “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” is as worthy an inclusion to the canon as any line you can find in The Gosport Tragedy.
Similarly, almost no one would think of Nick Cave as a folk artist, but The Bad Seeds’ 1996 album Murder Ballads is a fundamental link in the chain. Dredging up the ghosts of the past, retelling and reimagining ancient stories alongside penning his own macabre entries, Cave spectacularly revived the titular genre and laid down a new foundation stone. You can hear the record’s clanking dread echoing throughout Dublin doom folk outfit Lankum’s False Lankum, while the theatrical bloodlust of US murder folk artist Amigo The Devil owes more than a little to Cave and his red right hand. (Incidentally, both those acts had their roots in hardcore and metal before realising there was far more blood and guts to be found in folk music.)
Offshoots like darkfolk, gothic Americana and deathgrass burrow into more specific furrows, while acts such as the Cave-adjacent Current 93 and Lankum side project Øxyn have used unsettling, ambient textures to add an extra depth to their storytelling.
However, comparatively mainstream artists like Sturgill Simpson and Gillian Welch, whose song Caleb Meyer brilliantly subverts the murder ballad’s well-trodden tropes, show that these tales can still captivate and unsettle within a more traditional folk and country setting.
The aforementioned Bad Seeds LP being an obvious exception, it’s sometimes hard to find an album devoted *entirely* to songs about murder, but here’s a selection of some that lean hard into the darker narratives…