It's Festival Of Sleep Day ... So Good Morning And Good Night!

It's also Memento Mori Day, which is ... a different kind of goodnight.

Miss Lydia Louise, Miss Cursive, and Miss Wiglet showing interspecies comfort, courtesy of our pal Michael!

Happy Weekend!

Today is the Festival of Sleep, a day in which you are fully encouraged to drift in and out of sleep, I assume to make up for the lack of it over the last week or so. So go do that if you wish, but if you do, you’re going to miss out on a whole bunch of murder ballad type folk songs.

Why? Because it’s also Memento Mori Day — “memento mori” being a cheery phrase that means “remember you will die,” and referring to objects that remind you of that. Should I ever become a crazy rich person for some reason, I will probably spend a weird amount of money on Victorian-era memento mori jewelry and mourning jewelry, on account of how it is cool as hell. Well, that and the obvious Stevie Nicks temperature-controlled cape room of my dreams.

Thus, I bring you union activist, coal miner and folksinger Nimrod Workman singing the Appalachian folk song “Oh, Death,” also known as “Conversations With Death.” It is a fucking jam.

And here is another Appalachian folk singer, Jean Ritchie, singing “Barbara Allen,” a sorta-but-not-really-cause-the-guy-actually-just-died-on-his-own murder ballad that I think about a lot. Barbara Allen did nothing wrong, people! All she did was not love a guy who was a dick to her and died all on his own with no assistance from her whatsoever, and then she committed suicide the next day (after telling her mother, who did nothing to dissuade her) out of guilt.

Here is another favorite murder ballad — “Mary Hamilton” by Joan Baez, about a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Scots who is impregnated by the king and casts the baby out to sea in a basket and is then put to death.

Baez’s version of “Down By The Greenwood Side” (also known as “The Cruel Mother”) is another good one about infanticide and supernatural weirdness. That one is very closely related to another favorite, “The Well Below the Valley” (also known as “The Maid and The Palmer”), which is far more disturbing as it is about a palmer (who is sometimes meant to be Jesus) lecturing a victim of rape and incest about how she is going to hell for having killed the babies that resulted from her assaults. Which, you know, is really a lesson in why we need safe and legal abortions.

And here is Peggy Seeger singing “The Two Sisters,” which tells the story of a girl who drowns her sister out of jealousy, and which you probably know from the Tom Waits version on Orphans.

These are murder ballads, sure, but most of them really tell the story of a world in which women have no agency and how that doesn’t end well for anyone involved.

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