Where's Your Daddy? Old Blind Dogs and "Young Edward"

Randomness is strange thing, especially when it doesn't seem so random. In my previous post, I made mention of murder ballads. Today I did my random selection of a song for the day, which is kind of an elaborate process. I use a random string generator to come up with a random letter of the alphabet. With that letter, I go to my iTunes and I count the number of songs I have that begin with that letter. Let's say "E" has 252 songs. I then generate a random number between 1 and 252, and whatever that number is (let's say 136), I count from the first song in the "E" list to song number 136. If the song isn't a world song, I pick the world song nearest to it. It's a pretty random process. But when I mention murder ballads the day before, and a murder ballad comes up as the next day's song...I'm versed in statistics and probability as a political scientist but say what you want, the randomness argument seems weird. Did I influence events by thinking about murder ballads? I don't know.

What is a murder ballad? Murder ballads are traditional songs that describe the event of a murder. In particular, they often have a lead-up, a reveal, and the aftermath. Some are told from the point of view of the murderer. For example, one that Americans may know is the traditional ballad Banks of the Ohio, where a young man describes how he has taken his true love for a walk on the banks of the river, murders her for refusing his marriage offer, and then is taken away by the sheriff the next day as he laments killing his one true love. Or, Americans might remember Tom Dooley, sung by the Kingston Trio, about a man sentenced to hang for the murder of a young woman. Others tell the tale from the victim's point of view. The genre started in England, Scotland and Scandinavia, and later American versions of the same ballads started popping up, for example the American-Appalachian murder ballad Knoxville Girl came from the Irish Wexford Girl, which in turn came from the English Oxford Girl. New murder ballads are still being written and can be performed by almost anybody. Two of my favorite murder ballads are new - Lyle Lovett's LA County is a murder ballad about a man jilted by his lover and the horrific consequences when he shows up to her wedding. On the world scene, The Chieftains did a murder ballad on their holiday album The Bells of Dublin, with Elvis Costello singing the lyrics, called The St. Stephen's Day Murders in which a pair of sisters named Dawn and Eve Christmas do in their entire family with poison on the day after Christmas. Humans have always been both revolted and fascinated with murder, its motives and its consequences, and I like to think that the traditional ballads were both the soap operas and the moral lessons of their day, s sort of Grimm's Fairy Tales for adults to warn us of our baser natures and of the toll it takes on us and the wider world when we give in to those hatreds and jealousies.

So the murder ballad you are being presented with today is Young Edward by Old Blind Dogs. The ballad begins with a mother questioning her son. Why do you have blood on your sword, she asks? He goes through a whole set of excuses before finally revealing the bloody truth. The great thing about this ballad is that there isn't one revelation, but two! The mother questions her son closely about what he will do now, and at the end asks what will happen to her, to which Edward replies... Oh, but listen to the song and read the lyrics that are on the YouTube if you click the About link.

Old Blind Dogs were formed in 1990 when the three founding members met on a "buskers holiday" in the Scottish Highlands. The band was originally distinctive as it represented the music and traditions of Northeastern Scotland and sang in the dialect of Aberdeen and the region. The band focuses on traditional Scottish and Celtic music, with influences from rock, reggae, jazz, blues and Middle Eastern rhythms. Young Edward can be found (as Edward) on their 1999 CD The World's Room, and a live version (as Young Edward) can be heard on their 2005 CD Old Blind Dogs Play Live.