Daniel Newman
Law and Justice in Song: Murder Ballads and Popular Music will be published by Routledge in March 2026.
What is the book about?
The book encourages us to recognise that law and justice have deep roots in our popular music. Death and killing, especially murder, are foundational subjects in song as these emotive topics – at once universal and particular – occupy artists from place to place, and across generation to generation.
And no wonder because these dark and unpleasant topics of mortality challenge us, titillate us, compel us – even when we don’t want them to. It is a subject that makes us feel something, that shakes us. So of course art deals in the grim and grizzly matters of killing as we seek to get to grips with these impactful topics.
Accordingly, considering the value art can have for mediating our discourse on death and killing, we can trace a lineage of these songs back to the Middle Ages, which first saw the emergence of what, today, are called murder ballads. And my book is about murder ballads, songs about death and killing.
These murder ballads are crime songs writ through with violence. The crime could be real – the documenting of factual events in a homicide – but they could also be imagined, perhaps fantasy, teaching or metaphor. The song may detail the murder act, capturing gruesome detail about the fatality. The song may explain how the murder came about or deal with the consequences of the murder. Murder ballads can be first-person, with lyrics recounting the thoughts and deeds of the murderer, or they could take the form of an external commentary on the murder.
What unites murder ballads in all their variety is that the songs are centred on death and killing. These murder ballads are a cultural form that have legal issues at their heart. Death is co-opted into the realm of law and any death will require engaging with the institutions of law. But murder ballads involve a particular type death – killing – which makes the songs inherently criminal in their nature meaning that the criminal law is invoked. The criminal justice system is the domain into which the killing will be drawn.
We need to understand the relevance of law here. Students and practitioners of the law alike will encounter death and killing in their working with the law so I reckon that murder ballads are of great significance to anyone with an interest in the law. The murder ballads are a form of oral legal history that can teach lawyers about how death and killing, these ostensibly legal issues, are encountered outside the parameters of the law.
Murder ballads are a part of legal history that has not been fully considered previously so offer a novel way of approaching legal scholarship. This is a kind of social history that relates to ideas of history from below, a history that draws out the experiences and perspectives of ordinary people. These songs can help us to understand who has been included and excluded from (legal) history, and how we can ensure that a greater plurality of voices is heard.
In this book, I take a broad understanding of what constitutes a murder ballad. Conventionally, a murder ballad is understood as part of the oral song tradition of narrative ballads that emerged from the sixteenth centuries and remained popular up to the nineteenth century. These ballads meant that stories travelled from place to place, and were passed down from generation to generation.
They are perhaps known most famously as making up some of the 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century – the Child Ballads. Murder is present even from the earliest of ballads such as that of Mary Hamilton, a Scottish murder ballad from the 16th century, Mary Hamilton centres a fictional tale of infanticide.
But I am taking an inclusive approach in this book rather than an exclusive approach. I give equal credence to the old form and the wider influence of this form in contemporary descendants for the insight they give into death and killing in song. So, as much as I look at songs long considered part of that tradition – The Cruel Mother, The Knoxville Girl – I also bring a wealth of broader (and newer) songs into my analysis – Last Caress, ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, Meat Cleaver. And an old bluesman like Leadbelly is as to relevant to me as a more recent hip hop group like Cyprus Hill.
For me, murder ballads can be understood fundamentally as songs that look to tell stories grounded in death and killing: there is a narrative that centres around the murder. This open approach allows for a broad and robust collection of songs to inform the analysis that captures a fuller extent of the murder ballad influence.
Why did I write it?
I actually didn’t mean to write this book at all.
This will sound a wee bit melodramatic but the idea came to me in a dream. It wasn’t some glorious moment of joyful inspiration though. It was an anxiety dream. I had just started research leave and the project that I had committed to do fell apart at the last moment. I was desperate for something else to do with my six months break from teaching and I couldn’t think of anything.
One night, I woke up and remembered that I had written a couple of papers on murder ballads at the start of my academic career and I had always wanted to come back to it. I got up, grabbed my phone, opened the notes app and wrote down a list of songs about death and killing and put them under some loose categories. This became my idea: develop a typology of murder ballads, capture what they do for us. The typology I came up with that first morning came out pretty much fully formed.
I set out to write a paper first. Can I stretch this out to ten thousand words? I had my types and my songs but could I extend the discussion to a thousand words or so for each? Maybe. I started writing. And it came easy to me – it was fun writing about music for the first time in ages.
Within the month, I had more than ten thousand words. I decided I might try and write one of those short books that everyone seems to do these days. Like thirty thousand words? I thought maybe I could do that in the next five months. Again, my mind was racing and my fingers busy on the keyboard. I hit that within the next month.
I soon realised that this was going to be a proper book. I put what I had into a proposal and got a contract with Routledge. I ended up writing the bulk of it in that six months. I had a hundred thousand words and all the chapters down. Over the next year or so, I pottered around with it, added bits, improved others. It grew to a hundred and forty thousand words – and a different kind of stress, would the publisher let me publish something so long? Yes. Just.
How did I go about doing this research?
The heart of the book – and its most important contribution – is the typology. The eight types of murder ballads that I have picked out over time and space. I dedicated a chapter to each of them.
I begin the exploration of murder ballads by looking at moralising as it appears in these songs. Murder ballads often revolve around a sense of right and wrong, there will be lessons that must be learnt and consequences that need to be faced. Here I mean the morality of an eye for an eye: vengeance. We may get a narrator feeling they have been wronged and setting out to balance the cosmic order or a narration of an action leading to its inevitable result; a sense of natural justice.
The following chapter looks at bigotry in songs about death and killing, developing a gendered reading of murder ballads. Misogynistic violence has been central to this form from its early days. The murder ballad has long held femicide as a central concern so that the listener is often invited to sympathise with the man who murders a woman because she has supposedly been unfaithful.
In our third theme, I look at the usage of murder ballads in tribute and memorial. Collective memory across peoples allows for shared grieving and cultural forms can be integral to processes of developing and enabling a shared experience. This notion of the tribute or memorial song can be considered as speaking to the role of social sorrow. Songs can have a social power in recognising and commemorating hardship and struggle in how they tackle loss.
Shock value is the potential of media to provoke a reaction and I move on to consider it. The desired reaction is sharp, sudden and intense. The reaction could invoke feelings of fear, disgust or anger. In murder ballads, artists will stage murders in their songs and bring the audience into the murder act in confrontational and vivid depictions of killing.
I next consider how murder ballads can be bleakly funny and offer gallows humour. In gallows humour, we are encouraged to laugh at a hopeless or tragic circumstance. The situation might be precarious, maybe dangerous. This is humour found in the middle of an otherwise bleak instance such as death.
The next theme involves murder ballads being used as part of image management. Artists tell the audience something about themselves through their art. What the artist tells could be real or fictional, or some combination of the two, but murder ballads it can be used by artists who are tying claims to authenticity into some violent milieu.
I then consider how songs that deal with killing can be used to document and challenge inequality. I focus on how African American artists have used their work to tackle racism in the United States where there is a long history of protest music agitating for political change. The songs offer counter-storytelling about American justice: black history is represented and solidarity is solidified through music that deal with the brutality experienced in a white supremacist state.
Faith is the focus of my final theme as religion and spirituality can be important to many in facing up to their mortality. The moment of a death is when matters of faith can become most obvious and difficult to avoid. We can see the influence of spirituality in many different manifestations though considerations of punishment, redemption and repentance. I hope this moment of contemplation – and the hope of redemption – makes for a reassuring end to a pretty grueling book.