an american epic
by Douglas Messerli
Poor Dog Group The Murder Ballad (1938), performed by Jessica Emmanuel and Jesse
Saler, with music by Jelly Roll Morton / the performance I saw was on Friday,
April 24, 2015 at Los Angeles’ Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in
the Walt Disney Concert Hall
We have music historian and
archivist Alan Lomax to thank for the recording by the legendary self-declared
“creator” of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad,” a raunchy, salty,
tale of a woman’s love and her murder of another woman who has taken “her man,”
and who is later jailed for life, describing a heated lesbian sexual encounter
within a prison bed.
The immensely talented Los Angeles-based theater-performance Poor Dog
Group took the song, just as Morton had recorded it, and set it to a riveting
dance performance by Jessica Emmanuel, along with occasional interactions by
Jesse Saler. If it appears to be a simple theatrical convention, the way
Emmanuel twists and turns her body in ecstasy and horror throughout gives the
work a new sense of urgency that has to be seen to be appreciated. Let me just
say that the 45-minute The Murder Ballad
(1938)—first performed by this group at Redcat in the New Original Works
festival in 2012 and revived this past week at the same theater—was utterly
revelatory.
The work, as originally performed by Morton, places itself in a strange
situation with regard to gender, in part because its story of a powerfully
sexual woman is sung with a steady metronome-like accompaniment—which only
reiterates the inevitability of the narrative it relates—by an assertive, yet
time-worn voice of a male singer.
If you don’t leave my
fucking man alone
If you don’t leave my
fucking man alone
You won’t know what way that
you will go home
I’ll cut your throat and
drink your fucking blood like wine
Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking
throat and drink you blood like wine
Because I want you to know
he’s a man of mine
Emmanuel uses the occasion to wring out
her soul in whirling, leaning motions forward and backwards. Dressed only in a
pair of scanty panties and a loosely-fitting white top sheath, she becomes the
personification of simultaneous threat and regret, a forceful ogre who is at
the edge of desperation for her man’s neglect, reminding me a little of the
position of the jilted Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, the opera I saw a few hours later. But while
the betrayed Sicilian woman causes the death of her former lover, the woman of
Morton’s ballad actually shoots the other woman dead, for which she is
sentenced to life in prison.
What’s interesting is that the narrative, at this point, shifts from the
first person to the more objective third. The “I” is transformed into a “she,”
which further isolates the wronged woman:
She said, open your legs, you
dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between
the thighs
She said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my man
She said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my man
She said I killed that bitch
because she fucked my man
—the trinity of reiteration driving
the home both the cause and effect, “Policeman grabbed her and took her to
jail.” And for several more stanzas the work remains in the third person, as
she is brought to trial and sentenced.
It is only when she returns to the subject of sex that the first person
returns, creating an even odder relationship to the male-telling of her story:
I can’t have a man, so a
woman is my next bet
I can’t have a man in here;
woman is my next bet
She said to be a good-looking
mama: baby, I’ll get you yet
It shifts back to the third person
immediately as the sex actually occurs, but changes soon after, creating an
even deeper sense of sexual confusion as the poem recounts those very issues
arising in the woman herself:
She said, I could learn to
love you like a did that boy
She said, I should learn to
love you like I did that boy
To play with my thing like
that is pleasure like a toy
Every morning I want you to
give me some of this good cunt you’ve got
Every morning I want you to
give me some of this good cunt you’ve got
Because it sure is fine, it is
good and hot.
Presumably, this purposeful confusion of gender here is why the company
decided to bring Jesse Saler, a male dressed in a jockstrap, on stage, as a
somewhat effeminate surrogate, in opposition to the tall and statuesque
Emmanuel, to symbolically play the other woman of whom the ballad now sings:
I want you to screw me, screw
me like a dog
Screw me behind, sweet bitch,
screw me like a dog
When it gets good, I want to
holler out like a hog
It is the very crudeness of the repeated words that creates the
intensity of the ballad about a woman who sees sex from a point of view which
was then stereotypical that of a man, and sung by a man (almost a boy when
Morton first sang it). In the end the narrative encourages us to be both
enchanted by its honesty and disgusted by the events it describes, while
finding ourselves somewhat seduced by the fierceness of its sexuality if
appalled by its lurid details. In short, it has everything than an epic
American work has to have: innocence, sex, revenge, violence, guilt, regret and
personal salvation! I had a great time.
Los Angeles, April 26, 2015
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performane (April 2015).
