Josh Ritter’s “Folk Bloodbath” is a haunting, hallucinatory song featuring the title characters from three great American murder ballads: Stacker Lee, Delia Green, and Louis Collins. Ritter methodically kills them all off and inters them in the same graveyard: “And out of Delia’s bed came briars, / And out of Louis’s bed a rose, / And out of Stacker Lee’s came Stacker Lee’s cold lonely little ghost.” It’s 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. Which makes it a little surprising that Ritter chose to build the song around “Louis Collins” and its famous refrain, “The angels laid him away.” It’s the least typical murder ballad in his trinity—more of a threnody, and one with minimal narrative. And whereas Stacker Lee and Delia Green have appeared in American ballads for more than a century, rambling through countless and ever-evolving variants, “Louis Collins” is something different—less the property of “the folk” than of one particular musician: Mississippi John Hurt, whose 1928 recording has always been definitive.
Little can be learned about how most classic murder ballads were composed, though their lyrics tend to draw from actual events. Stacker Lee really did shoot Billy Lyons, and Delia went to rest, and Duncan
