Sing a song of murder – Cardiff Professor explores brutal musical genre

What do Nina Simone, The Beatles, SZA and Anderson .Paak all have in common?

Surprisingly, they’re all musical artists who have written and performed murder ballads, the topic of Professor Daniel Newman’s book, Law and Justice in Song - Murder Ballads and Popular Music, which was published by Routledge earlier this year.

A murder ballad is part of the oral song tradition of narrative ballads that emerged from the sixteenth century. These ballads originally allowed stories to travel from place to place, and were passed down from generation to generation.

More recently, Professor Newman suggests that murder ballads have been written and performed by a range of artists, from a variety of musical genres which provided him with a vast musical history to explore.

Talking of the inspiration for the book, Professor Newman explained, “The idea actually came to me in a dream.  I had just started research leave but the project I was working on wasn’t coming together so I was pretty stressed about what I could do. One night I woke up anxious and remembered that I had written something on murder ballads at the start of my academic career and had always wanted to come back to it. This became my idea: develop a typology of murder ballads and capture what they do for us. The typology I came up with that first morning came out pretty much fully formed as I tapped it into my notes app in the middle of the night.”

Students and practitioners of the law alike will encounter death and killing in their working with the law regularly. As a result, Professor Newman argues in his book that murder ballads, in all their forms should be of interest to anyone interested in law.

"Murder ballads tend to be rich in moralising. They often revolve around a sense of right and wrong and are saying that there’ll be lessons learnt and consequences faced.”

In his research Professor Newman also saw that murder ballads had historically been misogynistic compositions. The murder ballad has long held femicide as a central concern where the listener is invited to sympathise with a man who murders a woman because she has been unfaithful. However, in more recent times, female artists have reclaimed the murder ballad for themselves and turned the femicide trope on its head.

“We can see women artists in punk and hip hop included in this musical canon so to see it developed and subverted in this way over time is fascinating.”

To find out more about Professor Newman’s book, visit the Routledge website or read his blog post on the Journal of Law and Society’s blog.

Photo credits

The Beatles: Ingen Uppgift, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Nina Simone: Ron Kroon for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

SZA: The Come Up Show from Canada, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Anderson Paak: The Come Up Show, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons