JJ Cale: River Runs Deep in the badlands of murder ballads

Ron Counte

Naturally by the late JJ Cale (1971) is a truly wonderful album. Laid-back rhythms, fine playing, typically restrained vocals, and classic tracks such as Call Me The Breeze, Don’t Go To Strangers and After Midnight. It’s the kind of record you can listen to all the way through, time and time again, late into the evening without ever tiring of its atmospheric country charm. As JJ says, after midnight it’s all peaches and cream.

Yet there is one strange anomaly on an otherwise beautiful collection. River Runs Deep starts off with a jaunty rhythm that suggests we are in for a cheerful, possibly tongue-in-cheek ballad. It comes as something of a shock when we learn the track describes a man murdering a woman because of her alleged infidelity. To begin with I thought the whole piece was a metaphor about emotions running deep and the experience leaving the protagonist cold. But that interpretation does not stand up to scrutiny. The lyric is explicit, leaving no room for doubt.

Well, the river runs deep and the water is cold as ice


The river runs deep and the water is cold as ice


I go down there every chance I get


It’s where my baby she met her death


And the river runs deep and the water’s cold as ice

Ain’t no woman gonna make a fool out of me


Ain’t no woman gonna make a fool out of me


Running ’round, that’s what they said


She’s at the bottom of the river dead


And the river runs deep and the water’s cold as ice

No cheating woman gonna get a good man down


No cheating woman gonna get a good man down


Running ’round like a silly fool


You’re gonna end up at the bottom of the pool


And the river runs deep and the water’s cold as ice

The prosecution rests. It’s murder, m’lord. No sign of remorse either.

So what are we to make of this, from a normally sensitive and insightful writer such as JJ? If you’ve been even a casual visitor to folk clubs, you’d know there is a long tradition of so-called murder ballads, normally involving a jealous man bumping off his female partner.

Take Down By The River by Neil Young. It opens with the protagonist taking his lover’s hand, telling her he is on her side, and reassuring her that there is no reason to hide. But the mood changes somewhat as we get into the body of the song when out of the blue we discover…

Down by the river
 I shot my baby


Down by the river


Dead, ooh, shot her dead

Riverside walks can be dangerous if you are a woman with a suspicious boyfriend. This concept dates back to the traditional folk song Omie Wise (here’s Doc Watson’s version) based on the true-life murder of a woman called Naomi Wise in 1808. In the 1956 recording of Knoxville Girl (based on an old Irish folk song The Wexford Girl) by The Louvin Brothers, yet another woman ends up sleeping on the river bed courtesy of her jealous lover.

Unlikely as it seems, even Olivia Newton-John got in on the act with Banks Of The Ohio (1971) after Johnny Cash had sang it with the Carter family eight years earlier. The song, recounting the now customary end to a romantic stroll by the riverbank, dates back to the 1920s, recorded by a number of country musicians such as Clarence Greene.

Woods are best avoided too when unsure of your partner. Judy Collins followed Jean Ritchie by recording Pretty Polly in 1968, another macabre traditional tale, based on the 18th-century ballad The Gosport Tragedy, where a ship’s carpenter takes his lover to visit a freshly dug grave and, well, you can guess the rest.

It’s not only folkies who lead us down this disturbing path. Remember Delilah by Tom Jones? A huge hit in the Sixties, something of a party sing-a-long classic. Provided you don’t mind singing about murder, that is. Again, no room for doubt regarding motive and intent. After seeing ‘flickering shadows’ of his woman with another man, he waits to exact his revenge…

At break of day when that man drove away, I was waiting


I crossed the street to her house and she opened the door


She stood there laughing


I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more

Once again a man decides to murder a woman because she happened to get involved with another guy. Around the same time, and in a similar vein, Jimi Hendrix announced his arrival on the London scene with a cover of Hey Joe. He tells a pal exactly what he intends to do…

I’m goin’ down to shoot my old lady


You know I caught her messin’ ’round with another man, yeah


I'm goin’ down to shoot my old lady


You know I caught her messin’ ’round with another man


Huh, and that ain’t too cool

And sure enough he keeps his promise…

Yes, I did, I shot her


You know I caught her messin’ round, messin’ round town


Yes, I did, I shot her


You know I caught my old lady messin’ ’round town


And I gave her the gun


I shot her

Premeditated then. Most of the above tracks could be said to describe crimes of passion. But how do we assess Paul McCartney’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer?

Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer


Came down upon her head


Do do do do do


Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer


Made sure that she was dead

This is a cheerful little ditty about cold-blooded murder. No hint of motive. In his book The Lyrics McCartney references beheadings in Alice In Wonderland and the tradition of gruesome death in nursery rhymes. So it could be argued that this marks a step into the surreal. He confirms that the song is about a serial killer and mentions that the Moors Murders, in news bulletins at the time, were on his mind when he wrote the song, making its inclusion on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album even more questionable.

Nick Cave went as far as to release an entire album of murder ballads in 1996 called, not surprisingly, Murder Ballads. Kylie Minogue joins him on Where The Wild Roses Grow. On this charming number a guy bashes his lover’s head in with a rock, by a river naturally, so that her beauty would never fade. I guess that could be construed as a more altruistic motive than simple jealousy, though presumably not one the victim would have gained too much comfort from.

Four of the tracks on the Murder Ballads album involve a man murdering a woman while two are about women killing men. On Henry Lee PJ Harvey helps tell the tale of a woman who stabs her boyfriend with a penknife after he confesses to loving another woman. He ends up at the bottom of a well. On Crow Jane, a woman shoots 20 miners who had abused her.

Writing or singing about murder is not the same as condoning it. But murder songs as a form of entertainment are hard to justify when around three women a week are killed by their partners in the UK. To my mind the mysogynistic numbers described above seem totally inappropriate for a modern audience. Tom Jones has now dropped Delilah entirely from his set list. It took him only 50 years of reflection to conclude that the song was was probably in poor taste. But better late than never.

Recently Taylor Swift has tried to hit back with No Body, No Crime (2020), a song featuring Haim, about a woman taking revenge on a cheating husband suspected of murdering her friend. Which I suppose some might see as a more justifiable motive than a bout of jealousy and coercive control. Here’s how it plays out:

Good thing my daddy made me get a boating licence when I was fifteen


And I’ve cleaned enough houses to know how to cover up a scene


Good thing Este’s sister’s gonna swear she was with me (She was with me, dude)


Good thing his mistress took out a big life insurance policy

Similar motivation is in evidence on Goodbye Earl by The Chicks (2000) where, again, the victim is an abusive husband. The women poison him, wrap his body in a tarp, shove him in the trunk of their car and head to the lake for yet another watery grave. Turned out he was ‘a missing person who nobody missed at all’. Fair dues then.

So murder songs are part of a very old tradition. But like bear-baiting and minstrel singing, some customs are best left in the past.

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