Recording History:  Jake Adam York’s Murder Ballads

            When musicians record a song, they record much more than the song itself, especially if that song has been previously recorded.  Recording an original song commits to tape the songwriter’s vision as well as the music and historical moment of the recording.  However, recording a cover song, a song that may have been reinterpreted many times before, musicians capture not only the music and moment in history; they also record the history of that song, the way that history reverberates in every pulse of every note.  In this way, the history of a song is not really history at all:  the past and present become one in a recording.  Performer and song are committed to history just as they are committed to tape.  Past and present mesh in the recording.

            In a similar way, Jake Adam York is keenly aware of the way the past intrudes upon the present in his debut collection, Murder Ballads.  The title itself suggests the complexity of memory:  anonymous folk songs handed down generation to generation, murder ballads often tell violent stories of murders from the culprit’s perspective.  In a similar way, York explores both personal and public history in the book.  Like murder ballads, York’s poems record history, take down in art the violence of the past.  At once a love song and a requiem, Murder Ballads finds terror and beauty in the way that the Old South reverberates in the present.  Everywhere the poet looks, he sees the past bleeding into the present, from the recording of Charlie and Ira Louvin’s version of “Knoxville Girl” to a simple shard of iron.  In this masterful first collection, York establishes himself as an important, necessary voice in Southern Literature.  His awareness of past wrongs is tempered by his obvious love for the people and places he describes.  In these poems, York records history in the same way that musicians record songs:  history, art, and memory intertwine.

            As Jane Satterfield points out in her introduction, York is “A Southerner by birth and temperament [and] is attuned to questions of inheritance:  our relation to the land and to the law, to justice done and undone.”  York’s awareness includes those moments of unrecorded history, those defining moments not explored in orthodox views of the past, as in “Walt Whitman in Alabama,” a poem that explores the apocryphal tale of Whitman’s visit to York’s home state.  After imagining Whitman “remembering his poems,/his back to the door, singing/out to the garden of the world,” York wonders “what he did not say.”  The poem argues forcefully that memory is a political act, a way of preserving what should never be lost.  The meditation ends with an appropriately Whitman-like turn to nature’s song, the poet hopes that we can

....................tune our ears to the river’s whisper,
....................a baby cradled in branches
....................deep beneath the bridge.
....................Its ribs filter the Coosa’s brown.
....................Its arms raise the crops.
....................And some night it whispers the town
....................in some new forgotten tongue.

The implication of the lines is clear:  listening to nature’s song, we hear history in the land.  York’s cadences are oratorical, even sermon-like, and the poems speak in this same “new forgotten tongue.”

            York’s “new forgotten tongue” will not, however, forget the long history of racism and Jim Crow in the South.  While refusing to lay blame, York explores the South’s sometime violent history and its subjugation of minorities.  The violence toward African Americans especially haunts York.  Several poems describe photographs of such atrocities, as in “Bunk Richardson,” which looks at a “Lynching Photograph:  February 11, 1906:  Gadsen, Alabama.”  York remembers burnings, also, in the powerful poem, “Negatives,” about an actual postcard of the atrocity in which an entire town participated, supposedly justified in a revenge killing (the poem suggests).  The most powerful of these poems, however, is undoubtedly “Elegy for James Knox,” about the Alabama convict whose death in 1924 led the state to abolish its convict-labor program.  "Because a shackle is never enough to hold a man," the poem begins, addressing racial subjugation. However, the shackles alone don't hold a body: "the body must be made/to hold the man.”  As the poem narrates Knox’s death and cover-up, the speaker turns the guilty charge back on himself.  The incident is now “burned into textbooks,” which are

something dark to be turned
like this chip of iron I finger
as I think of you,
a small, hard strip of Alabama
that's losing, that's turning back
red as the clay that buries it all--
was it ever, will it ever be, enough?

The poem’s final question points to the main theme in Murder Ballads:  how do we reckon with history?  York presents no easy answers, as the past continues to haunt the book.

York sees concrete reminders of a violent, troubled past everywhere that he looks.  “On Tallaseehatchee Creek” finds an archaeological dig exploring the site where in the fall of 1813, Andrew Jackson’s troops burned a Creek village, killing some 200 Native Americans.  Digging into the past becomes metaphor, as the poet struggles to uncover the atrocity and then to make sense of or reckon with this horror.  As the speaker looks for “something to confirm the tale,” memory becomes conscious act against forgetting:  nature will overgrow the site and forget the past, a physical manifestation of forgetting.  But, despite what might be lost to nature, the poet finds concrete evidence of that past—an arrowhead fished from the creek.  This “confirmation of the tale” points back to one of the books’ main themes:  remembering and reckoning with memory.  Fittingly, the poem ends with a chilling reminder that much of the present is built on past atrocities:

When the chief sends me back
for metal detectors and finer screens,
I thread in quiet the subdivision maze
of streets already named,

Arrowhead Drive, Ember Lane.

In attempting to excavate the past, the speaker discovers that past and present commingle—he cannot separate them or sieve them apart.

However dark and tragic these poems may seem, as R.T. Smith has pointed out, York avoids “sensationalism [and] mere entertainment” in Murder Ballads.  Rather, York delves deeply into southern history and explores the questions of culpability and inheritance that haunt the contemporary South.  He refuses to use death and loss as mere subject matter.  In elegizing the victims of the South’s sometimes violent history, York reckons with his own “Southerness,” emphasizing his own relationship with that history .  It’s tempting to say that for York, the past and present collide.  For York, however, the past isn’t even the past:   it’s still present.  Like a musician reinterpreting an old song, York speaks through the song; yet both his voice and history are present.  Murder Ballads is a fine book of poems.  York’s precise phrasing, the music of his lines, and the depth of his vision mark this book as a welcome addition to Southern Liter

*Jeff Newberry grew up on the Florida Panhandle. Currently, he is pursuing a doctoral degree in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including storySouth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Gulfstream Magazine, and The Eleventh Muse.