From Attica to Appalachia: Greek Tragedy and Shatter Ballads

Shatter ballads had been segment of the Appalachian songbook for hundreds of years. Imported from the Scottish-English borderlands through the Irish province of Ulster, they continue to be smartly-liked aged songs within nation & bluegrass nowadays.

These tales of jilted enthusiasts, acts of ardour, and a killer humbled by the direct meting out justice aren’t easy morality plays. They faucet into a deeper vein of the human skills that connects assassinate ballads to Greek tragedy larger than contemporary songs. They both focal level on the bother that arises from ardour, the fatal energy of hubris, and the penalties of hamartia, the tragic flaw to which all of us are inclined.

Shatter ballads insist our ties to the past and a fading opinion of culture inherited from the Greeks, the place artwork carried an duty to repeat something about fact, even to focal level on the horrifying. This day, this responsibility has degenerated into a demand for “relevancy” or to focal level on “identification.” Moderns be taught with an perceive in opposition to sociology and anthropology and absorb lost a focal level on artwork and data.

Shatter ballads confront listeners with the complexity of life and man’s fight between dignity and weak point, correct because the writings of Euripides and Sophocles did something identical for Athens. “Ardour overmastereth sober opinion/And here’s reason within the serve of direst ills to males,” Euripides reminds his audience in Medea. In Colter Wall’s “Kate McCannon” (a recent assassinate ballad), readers be taught the penalties of unrestrained ardour:

Neatly the raven is a atrocious bird

His wings are black as sin

And he floats outdoors my penal complex window

Mocking those within.

These ballads, aged or contemporary, contact on what makes us human. Our weaknesses, our responses to injustice, and a want for revenge that would possibly maybe allege grave penalties. Like Greek tragedy, they emphasize the darkness that runs through the coronary heart of us all.

Damaged-down assassinate ballads present a story of an innocent lady murdered by her lover. Typically he gets her pregnant sooner than murdering her to steer clear of shame, in most cases he kills her when she has an affair. Typically, the man promises marriage to entice her away sooner than killing her.

When the assassinate is chanced on, the man is hanged or imprisoned (even though, in most cases, he escapes). The killer in “Omie Colorful,” as an instance, faces justice, nonetheless in “Banks of the Ohio,” the narrator expresses sorrow and remorse without facing gorgeous punishment.

Contemporary assassinate ballads can hotfoot away from that structure while conserving the fable themes. In the Avett Brothers’ “I Killed Sally’s Lover,” the assassin is thrown in detention heart, nonetheless Sally survives on memoir of, as we’re instructed, “I’d execute you too if I had the nerve/But I correct ain’t that mean.” The Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” is a revenge song the place a girl kills her abusive ex-husband. And Old Crow Medication Present an explanation for’s “Bootlegger’s Boy” tells of the hubris of a younger moonshiner who “killed a man in a feud over whiskey.”

Shatter ballads part a energy with Greek tragedy that comes from a simply working out of fact and the vicissitudes of life. Tragedy wasn’t a response to believing within the emptiness of life. It became a reflection of believing that distress and sorrow had been a pure segment of life. “That life became a vale of tears, by which nothing would possibly maybe maybe subject very unheard of, became an opinion that fully a few Greeks entertained,” the British classicist H.D.F. Kitto wrote in The Greeks. “The undercurrent of tragedy is assuredly now now not due to any feeling that life is now now not worth while; it became a feeling of tragedy, now now not of despair.”

The Greek thoughts had ample self-assurance to gaze the significance in writing about dire conditions males and women had to navigate no subject having no correct alternate choices. “The Athenians of the fifth century succeeded in taking a gaze upon life with a stage seek,” Paul Landis argued in his introduction to Four Eminent Greek Plays. “They confronted it neither with bravado and bluster, nor with effort and trembling; now now not with an ignorant assumption of energy over it, nor with an equally ignorant and cowardly feeling of inferiority. They chanced on it now now not continuously satisfying; after all extra commonly it became a darkish, unsure fight with the percentages in opposition to them.”

Tragedy within the Greek sense became permitted as a fact of life, unheard of as one other force: passionate enjoyment of life. Ardour delights man; tragedy humbles him. Tragedy forces him to scrutinize and accept limitations upon his energy. As Landis wrote, the Greeks “permitted life as they chanced on it, now now not as correct or atrocious, nonetheless as a fact…of their dramas they supplied life now now not because it must be, nonetheless because it became and is.”

But nowadays, tragedy is extra more likely to be viewed as an aberration from the norm, if now now not unacceptable. When something goes wicked, any individual must shoulder the blame.

Standard audiences absorb change into extra complacent, extra insulated, and additional stable. Shatter ballads are a connection to an American past closer to ragged Greece when consolation or security became less assured. Tragedy became less theoretical. And here’s why Greek drama serene resonates with audiences conversant in tragedy, a lot like prisoners, veterans, and healthcare workers.

Tragedy wasn’t fully a pure segment of life that folks had been powerless to reply, alternatively. It became commonly the logical result of an particular person’s actions. Because the Nurse foreshadows conflict in Medea when Jason spurns Medea and their kids for the hand of Creon’s daughter,

Now all is hatred: deal with is illness-stricken.

For Jason, traitor to his babes and her,

…

And, slighted thus, Medea, hapless wife,

Cries on the oaths, invokes that mightiest pledge

Of the gorgeous hand, and calls the Gods to opinion

What recompense from Jason she receives.

But tragedy would possibly maybe maybe now not be shunned in a life properly-lived. Utopia, too, is out of reach, as man is now now not a absolute most realistic creature. Yet again, from Medea:

Nurse:

Hear, babes, what father here’s unto you!

I curse him—now now not: he is my grasp serene:

But to his friends he stands convict of baseness.

Children’s Guardian:

What man is now now not? Hast learnt this fully now,

That no man loves his neighbour as himself?

Correct reason absorb some, with most ’tis greed of invent—

As here: their sire for a bride’s sake loves now now not these.

Balance is now now not the pure direct of life—trade is. The Chorus laments, after Medea plots vengeance:

Justice is grew to change into to injustice, the remark of dilapidated to confusion:

The thoughts of the hearts of males are treachery wholly,

And, reeling

From its ragged foundations, the faith of the Gods is change into a delusion.

In all places trade!

Alternate can additionally be a trade of coronary heart. Feel sorry about commonly follows violence in Greek tragedy because it does in a assassinate ballad. Because the narrator in “Banks of the Ohio” cries “Oh Lord, what absorb I finished,” so does Oedipus insist “I sinned, a sin no gallows would possibly maybe maybe atone.”

Standard audiences absorb inherited a deal with of comedy from the Greeks, nonetheless tragedy that forces them to repeat on the baseness of man has been left within the serve of. Shatter ballads are a remnant of a culture extra linked to the ancients. Mass culture, larger than folks culture, has a elevated focal level on the short-time-frame, on “relevant” tales that uplift “marginalized” voices.

Whereas some fundamental tales would possibly maybe maybe additionally accumulate the delayed consideration they’ve long deserved, low-price leisure crowds out an extended scrutinize of society and culture. Superhero movies absorb muscled out a void as soon as filled by Greek delusion, faith, and other folks cultures. Serial dramas about police and clinical doctors absorb modified ragged tragedy.

When Greek tragedy does accumulate consideration, in culture or in training, the level of ardour is less on knowledge and additional on a imprecise sociological opinion of “revealing the layers of which suggests.” In direct of focal level on what Euripides can negate us about unrestrained ardour dragging down man, students are inspired to absorb in thoughts energy structures. Coming come the inheritance of the past with such a lens is a failure of civic responsibility.

As assassinate ballads insist, it wasn’t that manner serve when audiences would possibly maybe maybe dwell on tragedy, revenge, and justice. They would possibly maybe maybe pity or sympathize with a assassin without the distraction of a pedagogy that berated them for now now not questioning its oppressive assumptions.

Losing that mental house for tragedy, and the assassinate ballad custom, leaves us poorer. Location on suffering and the fight of man is a necessary segment of creating an correct society. The Greeks understood this and instituted it as segment of civic responsibility. Shatter ballads remind us of the hazards inherent in man’s energy and the hand of justice.

Oedipus is extra more likely to be referenced nowadays as a result of malign affect of Freud than the memories of Sophocles, nonetheless returning to the provision, we’re reminded of our beget weaknesses. For, “when in the end blind and inflamed, with blood streaming from his sightless sockets,” Oedipus “rushes from the scene,” he leaves the audience “transfixed on the malevolent energy of circumstance and the bleak skill of the human soul for suffering,” Landis wrote. That reminder is fundamental, as we’re ever tempted to mistake limits as irrational boundaries stopping the fulfillment of utopia.

Anthony Hennen is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Tutorial Renewal.