This morning I played the Louvin Brothers’ rendition of “The Knoxville Girl” for my six-year-old daughter while she ate her breakfast. I warned her that it might be scary. When she heard the old-time country music begin, she smiled and let her head bob back and forth like a doll, which I think is the way she dances to something that sounds old fashioned.
“This isn’t scary,” she said.
She misheard “fair girl” for “fire girl,” and when I corrected her she thought it was very funny. “Poor fire girl,” she laughed, chocolate-chip pancake spilling out of her mouth.
At the end of the song, the brothers’ voices mingle and blend for the final line. It is so menacing and spooky, but maybe it is the angelic quality to their harmony that guts me: “Because I murdered that Knoxville girl, the girl I loved so well.”
My daughter and my wife said the same thing at the same time: “He didn’t love her well!”
My daughter asked me why the man had been so mean, and I said that this version of the song doesn’t really tell us why—it’s a mystery. It all happens so fast. I started to tell her that there was a story, from a much older version of the song, that does give a reason—but then I stopped myself. She’s six.
The other day, I played my wife some macabre songs that Dolly Parton wrote early in her career. This is probably not the first thing you think of when you think of Dolly, but she penned a number of ballads with dead babies, suicide, arson, throwing rocks at a bride in lieu of rice, and so on. (“Dolly Darko,” my wife said.)
Not long ago, a reporter asked Dolly about this darker side. She wanted to write about the real troubles in people’s lives, she said. And as a songwriter, she said, “you gotta remember too that’s how I grew up. All those old mountain songs and all those old songs from the old world. All those old English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ballads about the Knoxville girl getting killed and throwed in the Knoxville River. And I was very, you know, impressionable.”
There is something in us, perhaps, that is drawn to this sort of song.