The acclaimed singer/songwriter Josh Ritter, as a young man, created a brand-new major for himself at Oberlin College and graduated with a degree in American History Through Narrative Folk Music. Listeners of his work, though, do not need access to this piece of trivia to convince them of his deep and lasting relationship with the genre. On his eleven studio albums over the intervening twenty-five years or so, as well as on his various EPs and uncollected tracks, he has regularly pulled from his knowledge of America's folk tradition in both typical and unexpected ways. From rewriting stories found in well-known classics like "Pretty Polly" and "Silver Dagger" to peppering his songs with references to a diverse range of folk standards, he has consistently used the shorthand created by a knowledge of this music to create mood and meaning. On the tracks where his relationship with the American folk canon gets most interesting, though, Ritter acknowledges a number of tensions he feels as a student and standard-bearer of the tradition: the tension between the time described in the songs he loves and the time he finds himself in, the tension between the amoral world these songs exist in and the morality he wants to believe in, and the tension between folk music's longevity and his own mortality. 

Ritter is far from the first folk artist to take the songs that preceded him and rework them for his own needs, of course, as doing so is essential to the tradition and has been modus operandi from long before luminaries like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan famously did it. His first recorded reworking of a folk standard was his version of Pretty Polly," which appeared on his eponymous and self-released 1999 album. "Pretty Polly," though it began its long journey as an English ballad called "The Gosport Tragedy," has been sung and adapted by dozens, if not hundreds, of American folk artists. Alan Lomax, the famed ethnomusicologist, wrote that the song is "America's favorite crime story, the same tale that Dreiser used as the theme of An American Tragedy. Pretty Polly is pregnant and Willie puts her out of the way." Some versions explicitly confirm that the victim is pregnant while others do not, but they all feature the two lovers walking into the woods and finding a grave already dug there, confirming that the murder was premeditated. Indeed, the murderer in this ballad differs from so many similarly violent characters in his calculating nature; as Rennie Sparks writes, "This is no crime of passion. He stayed up all night to dig her grave ahead of time." One of the most interesting variables in versions of the song is perspective. Paul Slade writes that "unlike any other murder ballad I can think of, Pretty Polly is constantly switching its narrative point of view, forcing the singer to speak as a neutral witness in one verse, as the killer in another, and as Polly herself in a third." Estil C. Ball's take on the classic, for example, was recorded in 1959 and featured on Lomax's Bad Man Ballads; it narrates the murder itself in the third person, but begins with Willie calling Polly to follow him and ends with him telling us that "killin' Pretty Polly will send my soul to hell." Some versions, like Ritter's, see Willie and Polly trading verses back and forth as she comes to realize what they are doing in the woods. Ritter's version contains many of the elements the song generally includes – two speakers, a pre-dug grave, the murder itself – but incorporates several new elements as well and, in doing so, introduces uncertainty into the narrative. 

First, Polly is described as a bird sitting on a tree branch who knows better than to fly down to Willie, which  can be understood as an extended metaphor, wherein Polly is still actually a human woman. Ritter's language here recalls to the folk music fan another standard, the murder ballad with roots in the English Child Ballad "Young Hunting" and alternately known in American versions as "Henry Lee" and "Love Henry," in which a woman kills a man who refuses to tryst with her because he loves another. The song ends with the murderer asking a bird to fly down and become her pet; she promises a cage of gold, but is turned down. In Dick Justice's 1929 version, which was the first track on Harry Smith's famed Anthology of Folk Music, the murderer says she would kill the bird for refusing her, as she has killed the man who rejected her, if only she had a bow and arrow. The bird replies: "If you had your bend and bow, your arrow and your string, / I'd fly away to the merry green land and tell what I have seen." The bird is a threat to the murderer because it can tell of her crime. Ritter's murderer speaks to Polly, the bird/woman: "The song you sing and the story you tell / We must keep them to ourselves." This murder is done to silence Polly, to keep some truth from emerging. Ritter is eliding the two folk standards here; Greil Marcus even writes that the bird in "Love Henry," "in many variants takes the name 'Pretty Polly.'"  

Ritter performs a neat trick as he works more than one folk ballad into a song, and one he repeats with more sophistication later in his career. In her tree, a "rope hangs bruised and worn," and she can see "two holes so deep." The rope and the second hole make Ritter's "Pretty Polly" different from the majority of the versions that preceded it and present two very different options for the song's ending. If calling Polly a bird is just a metaphor, then this Willie doesn't seem to be planning on surviving the night. Though Ritter doesn't explicitly state it, who else could the rope be for but for himself? If this Polly is pregnant out of wedlock, as she is usually understood to be, then this Willie is not just trying to get rid of a problem, but desperate to put an end to the whole situation, to silence her before the truth comes out and then follow her to the grave. The most fascinating and chilling element of the traditional ballad – the cold, psychotic affect of the murderer – is gone in that understanding of the song. The other possibility is that Polly is a bird and, like the bird of "Love Henry," she plans to inform on Willie. In this version, one grave is for the bird, and the other is for the girl he will lead back to this spot tomorrow who must follow him to her death unwittingly. In Pete Seeger's version of "Pretty Polly," Willie buries his lover and leaves "nothing behind but the wild birds to moan." Maybe Ritter's Willie, rather than being less cold and premeditated, is more: he's not even taking chances with the birds snitching on him. 

"Silverblade" – recorded by the author on 2019's Fever Breaks, but written for Joan Baez, who recorded it (as "Silver Blade") for her allegedly final studio album, 2018's Whistle Down the Wind – reimagines the standard "Silver Dagger." The song's roots, like "Pretty Polly's," are across the ocean, and variants have been known as "Katie Dear," "Drowsy Sleeper," and "Oh, Molly Dear, Go Ask Your Mother." American recorded versions have existed since the 1920s, including a well-loved bluegrass rendition by Dolly Parton, but it was Baez herself who recorded the best-known folk version on her eponymous debut album in 1960. In "Silver Dagger," a young girl is sleeping beside her mother when her would-be suitor calls to her from the window to serenade her with love songs. She tells him she will not be courted, for her mother has forbidden it – warning her that all men are false and wielding the title weapon. Whether the mother's warnings would be borne out, we never know, as the protagonist plans to stay celibate. The mother, who sleeps through the song, is the only character whose motivations we can fully understand. As I have stated elsewhere, "The girl's desires are never known in 'Silver Dagger.' Is it fear of the man's cruelty or of her mother's that keeps her from her suitor? Clearly, the mother has been wronged and wishes to spare her daughter the same fate, but the young woman in this tale has no agency."

In "Silverblade," we once again have a young woman, a virgin, being courted by a young man, but there is no mention of any parental figure here or any obstacle to the couple's union. The young girl believes the suitor that she will "his lady be" and sleeps with him upon this promise. The silver dagger, rather than being a weapon wielded by her threatening mother as in the original song, is used by the suitor to cut off a lock of the speaker's hair as a post-coital trophy before he bids her "dress and go her way." She, waiting until he turns his back, grabs the knife and kills him, buries him secretly, and keeps only the silver dagger and her hard-won wisdom as souvenirs of the episode. Ritter's "Pretty Polly" adds mystery to the original, but his take on "Silver Dagger" does the opposite; as Ken Bigger writes in Sing Out, "There are a lot of stories that take place around 'Silver Dagger,' and a good many of them may involve murder. That neither Parton nor Baez nor any of the other singers who take up that version actually give us the story directly doesn't mean that it isn't there." Where the original left us with questions about the mother's motives, the daughter's desires, and whether that dagger ever got used, this one leaves us only with questions about justice. As I have argued elsewhere, "A woman 'ruined' in the song's time period would likely not have been able to marry and so being lied to by a lover who claimed real commitment was a life-changing disaster. The song, however, doesn't actually ask or answer any questions about whether murder was an appropriate response to what was done to the speaker, but it does offer her agency."

Where these two songs are entirely based on their traditional forebears, dozens of Ritter’s lyrics contain briefer allusions to some of folk's most oft-sung and well-loved standards. The references keep his music and its feeling firmly rooted in the tradition even as he explores further afield musically and lyrically, and they operate as touchstones for his audience. On his Springsteen-esque existential love song "Lantern," featured on 2010's So Runs the World Away, the singer tells his paramour he will hold his lantern high, guiding her, because he "know[s] [she's] got…[her] own valley to walk," a reference to the classic "Lonesome Valley," alternately known as "You've Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley" or "Jesus Walks This Lonesome Valley." This song has roots in both the white Appalachian and black enslaved communities. In almost of all of its many versions, the lyrics insist that "you've got to walk that lonesome valley all by yourself"; "that lonesome valley" is not explicitly identified in the lyrics and has been interpreted as death, danger, fear, temptation, and more. For Ritter's purposes, it is as vague as it ever was, making it the perfect allusion here. The speaker's lover is her own person and has her own challenges, her own struggles, and ultimately must negotiate her own path in the world; the most he can do is try to shine a light, to try to guide her way back to him safely. The brief lyrical reference to "Lonesome Valley" immediately connects the listener with the spiritual loneliness and yearning the root song has and enriches "Lantern" by connecting the two. 

In one of Ritter's signature songs, "Kathleen," he sings from the perspective of a besotted teenager who gets the opportunity to drive his crush home from a party; this seemingly small experience gives Ritter the opportunity to explore huge, catholic themes like loneliness, desire, belonging, connection, and pride. It is no mistake that the object of his speaker's affection shares a name with the beloved in the well-known, and once very popular, American ballad "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen." The song, written by the German-American Thomas P. Westendorf in 1875, features the speaker promising his wife Kathleen that he will bring her back across the ocean to her homeland. Though it never explicitly states that Kathleen's longed-for country is Ireland, the woman's name, the use of the adjective "bonnie," and the description of the "fields...fresh and green" have, for nearly 150 years, made the song a favorite among Irish and Irish-American singers. Ritter's "Kathleen" appeared on 2003's Hello Starling, a record written and recorded after he found his first real fame while touring in Ireland, supporting the Irish band The Frames; the album was produced by Frames guitarist David Odlum. That Westendorf's song of longing and promise would be on Ritter's mind, as both a student of American song and a recent traveler in Ireland, as he began to craft his own song of teenage longing and promise, makes sense. As Ritter promises, "I'll be the one to drive you back home, Kathleen" and later crows triumphantly, "I drove you home," listeners do not actually need to know "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" to feel the aching, complicated, human triumph, but it adds an extra dimension of sweetness, humor, and pathos to the song. 

Too many of Ritter's songs to mention feature trains, probably the most instant and lasting symbol of the American folk tradition, but one in particular serves as a potent example of how Ritter expresses a felt tension inherent in being a twenty-first century singer with such strong roots in songs from a distant time. In another of his signature songs, "Me & Jiggs," featured on his second album, Golden Age of Radio, he describes an evening with friends, singing and reveling and trying desperately to ignore the passage of time, the inevitability of change and loss. He sings, "On a Saturday night in a town like this, I forget all my songs about trains." Here  the line has double meaning. Trains symbolize leaving, of course; when he is joyful, with his friends and his lover, his urge for going is stilled by satisfaction. At the same time, those "songs about trains" are the very kind of songs we've been discussing – songs from the American folk tradition – and they are not compatible with the actual life he is living. Young men in the twenty-first century, who are playing guitars on their porch, drinking beers, and going on dates with their girlfriends, as the song describes, just do not hop on trains and seek their fortunes further on down the road. That Bound for Glory vision of life is a Romantic one now to the student of folk music, not a realistic one. Gordon Lightfoot famously sang "you can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train," expressing even in 1966 that the world had moved on from the way of life immortalized in the great folk songs of our tradition, and by 2001, when Josh Ritter was releasing "Me & Jiggs" for the first time, he was forced to recognize the incompatibility of real life and his "songs about trains." 

Another incompatibility between reality and the fictionalized world of folk music emerges in what is probably Ritter's most explicit nod to the tradition that helped shape him. In 2010's "Folk Bloodbath," Ritter ingeniously weaves together the narratives of "Delia," "Louis Collins," and "Stack-a-Lee" to create a sort of uber-murder ballad. Delia Green was a fourteen-year-old shot to death in Savannah in 1900, about whom American folk and blues artists have been singing for over a century. Two main strains of songs about Delia's death exist; in one, her murderer is named in the third person, though rarely by his historical name, Mose "Cooney" Houston (probably, as Sean Wilentz argues, "to avoid racial connotations"). In the other strain, the murderer himself sings the song, describing the shooting of little Delia in first person. Ritter doesn't specify how his Delia has died, but his audience probably knows enough to know that she is murdered by gunshot in both strains, so it's not of natural causes. He imagines that she is romantically involved with Louis Collins, the murder victim in Mississippi John Hurt's famous ballad, from which the structure and the chorus of "Folk Bloodbath" have also come. Though recent scholarship has suggested that the song predates Hurt and thus challenges his long-claimed authorship, it is certainly Hurt's version that is known by most folk music fans and is used here by Ritter. In Hurt's "Louis Collins," people dress up in red to mourn the title character's murder by two shooters named Bob and Louis; in "Folk Bloodbath," Collins goes to buy a red suit and hat in order to mourn Delia's death and has the misfortune to run into Stack-a-Lee. Stack-a-Lee, of course, alternately known as Stagger Lee, is the murderer in the same-named ballad that has seen dozens and dozens of versions – perhaps most famously Lloyd Price's 1959 R&B hit – and is known to kill people over hats. Here, Stack shoots Louis for his red Stetson and goes on trial, only to face a judge named Billy Lyons, the name of Lee's victim, both in real life and in most versions of "Stack-a-Lee." Here, though, Lyons gets to be the judge and he sentences Stack to death; he is hanged, after which the fourth iconic folk song of the bloodbath gets incorporated. "Barbara Allen" is the only one of the four which is neither a murder ballad nor of American origin – as it dates to at least the sixteentth century in England – and is believed to be "the most widespread folk song in the English language, with more variant versions than any other song and the greatest geographic spread" (Marsh 9). The characters are not named in Ritter's pastiche, but the final image of the three dead characters is a reference to it. In the ballad, a briar grows out of the grave of Barbara Allen while a rose grows out of the grave of Sweet William, her would-be suitor, and the two form a lover's knot. The image of the briar and the rose is an extremely iconic one in the folk tradition; it is, for example, the title of Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus's jointly edited volume on folk music, as well as the title of a Tom Waits song. In Ritter's version, the rose and the briar grow out of Louis Collins's and Delia's graves respectively, but they are joined by – coming out of Stack-a-Lee's grave – "Stack-a-Lee's cold, lonely, little ghost." 

The song is immensely fun for any fan of folk music, as it imagines the worlds of these famous characters colliding. Ritter himself told NPR: "I wanted to put Barbara Allen, Stagger Lee and Delia and Louis Collins all together in a song and see who came out [alive]." He is not the first important songwriter to play these games with these characters: on the Grateful Dead's 1978 album Shakedown Street, they performed a Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia penned version of "Stagger Lee" that imagines Billy Lyons's widow was Delia who, after the law refuses to act against her husband's killer, finds Stagger Lee at a bar, shoots off his testicles, and hauls him to the jail for hanging. It is, like Ritter's version, a fun scramble, though nothing of Delia's original character or fate remains; the name alone speaks to the marriage of the two murder ballads. Ritter's song is a more interesting interweaving of the stories, but it also doesn't end there, and it is the song's final verse, almost a coda, that reveals the tension alive in "Folk Bloodbath." Ritter, for the first and only time in the song, speaks in first person: "And I'm looking over rooftops / And I'm hoping that it ain't true / That the same God looks out for them / Looks out for me and you." As students, listeners, and performers of these songs, how much do we accept of their morality? Eric McHenry writes that Ritter's song "is a strange and lovely mashup, a sidelong commentary on the curious human tendency to set brutal stories to beautiful melodies, and to tell those stories over and over again, in endless variations." They are titillating, murder ballads, but what do they say about the world we live in and the nature of God? Delia is shot by her lover; Louis Collins is murdered for no stated reason at all; Stack-a-Lee kills Billy Lyons over a hat. They are fun to sing, fun to scramble up and reimagine, but Ritter's final lines are almost an aching plea for a world with more justice, more mercy, and more reason than the one the folk tradition offers us. 

Though most of Ritter's folk music allusions are to American folk standards, either ones with origins here or which traveled across the sea from the Britain Isles, in 2003's "Bone of Song," found on Hello, Starling, he considers folk music on a broader scale. The fable is sung in the first person, and the speaker tells of a walk in the woods and the discovery of a magical object: the titular bone of song. It is described as an old jawbone with words etched all over it, and it speaks, declaring: "Lucky are you who finds me in the wilderness / I am the only unquiet ghost that does not seek rest." The bone of song is corporeal, material, able to be picked up and touched, but it describes itself still as a kind of a ghost, a remnant, and not one seeking rest or quiet. Indeed, song yearns to be sung, and so longs to be literally un-quiet. It is interesting, of course, that Ritter describes the bone as being covered mostly in words and not notes or other markings that would denote melody or tune (there is one reference to "chords”). What kind of music, then, does the bone of song hold? Folk music, in its broadest sense: the music of the people, music from all over the world and from all times, songs that survive even as melodies and memories change or die away. The song describes: 

The words on the bone of song were close and small
And though their tongues were dead, I found I knew them all
In the hieroglyphs of quills and quatrain lines
Osiris, the fall of Troy, Auld Lang Syne
Kathleen Mauvoreen, Magnificat, Your Cheatin’ Heart
The chords of a covenant king singing for the Ark 

From narratives sung in ancient Egypt and Rome to sentimental Irish and Scottish ballads, from Hebrew psalms and Christian canticles to Hank Williams tunes, the bone of song bears the lyrics of the songs that people sing, the songs that live through the ages in hearts and minds. 

The speaker in the song is told he can add something to the bone and that it will be remembered and sung forever, but that he himself will still die and be forgotten. The bone tells him: "leave me here, I care not for wealth or fame / I'll remember your song, but I'll forget your name." The speaker sings his song, adds them to the beautiful weight of folk music, and leaves the bone where he found it. It is a happy song. Ritter, indeed, describes the fact that the music outlives the human as a "blessing," and the speaker walks away from this encounter "with a lightness in [his] step and a song in [his] bones." 

The disparity between the longevity of folk music and the brevity of human life was not a cause of concern for Ritter and the "Bone of Song" protagonist. Written in 2003, when the songwriter was not yet thirty, perhaps the romanticized fable emphasizing the glorious ongoing power of folk music despite its creators' deaths didn't seem like a personal, existential threat. That tension became much clearer and more personal in 2023 when, on Ritter’s eleventh full length studio album, Spectral Lines, he revisited it briefly and almost unnoticeably. 

Spectral Lines is a strange album in the Ritter canon. As Mark Pelavin of Americana Highways noted, it "is a powerful but quiet, highly-atmospheric set of songs; a set focused on life's most difficult questions." The album –  short and full of shorter songs than Ritter is best known for – is dedicated to the artist's mother, who died in 2021. Like the titular spectral lines that reach to us through the galaxy and allow us to understand the universe around us, the musical lines reaching from track to track mirror the lines Ritter seems to be sending out from the words of the songs themselves, reaching out to his listeners and just maybe to his late mother. On the eighth track, entitled "Any Way They Come," Ritter sings two verses of what seems like a disappointed love song aimed at a cheating lover. Then, softly and seemingly unrelatedly, he speaks: 

I came here with nothing
I'll be gone before long
Tell me, whatever's left
Of the breath of a song?
But if that's all there is
It's more than enough
And it wasn't for nothing
I gave it all of my love 

How unexpected that his consideration of mortality and song, the balance between them, the weight of their importance, should be spoken and not sung, and should appear in a seemingly unrelated song. It creates the sensation that we are hearing Ritter's own personal thoughts here –  not the fable-like adventures of an imagined speaker – even stronger. In "Bone of Song," the speaker apparently felt little dread or sorrow at the thought of his own mortality when weighed alongside the value and longevity of his work. Here, as Ritter revisits that tension in middle age, as a father and after recently losing his beloved mother, skipping away from that realization isn't so easy. He knows he will have to die, and he wonders what will be "left of the breath of a song?" Gone is the concreteness of the bone of song; now it is a breath only – more tenuous, more fleeting. Will there be an afterlife? Will his legacy and his work last after his death? How far will the faint spectral lines of his verse reach? What will be left of him? These questions are much more serious and present than they were twenty years ago, but ultimately Ritter's answer is the same: serving the music is enough. He can hope there is more, but "if that's all there is / it's more than enough."

 Despite his insistence that he'll be "gone before long," Josh Ritter is, of course, not yet fifty, and his listeners have reason to believe he has a lot of music left to offer them. Whether a third installment in his struggle to reconcile the lasting nature of folk music with the brevity of human life awaits or not, there is little doubt that folk music itself, and particularly the folk standards of the American tradition, will continue to inform his work. As he has exercised new and unexpected songwriting muscles over his career thus far, he has consistently pulled from the tradition that shaped him to explore his world and engaged with it as a source of both tension and value.

June 2024

From guest contributor Lily Corwin, Virginia Tech

Photo Credit: Kelly Doyle