If you watch streaming TV, you’ve likely internalized its formula for plot, how the opening scene introduces a murder or illness that the heroes spend the rest of the episode trying valiantly (but mostly failing) to solve. The best series follow Stephen King’s idea of situation driving a story more effectively than plot. Paul Sheldon’s predicament in Misery is a good example. After crashing his car, Sheldon wakes up with two broken legs in the home of a psychotic fan whom he has to placate while planning his escape.
That formula works well enough for novels and memoirs if you’re not trying to reinvent the Freytag pyramid. But if you are looking for craft inspiration outside the digital bubble, I recommend turning to folk ballads. Some ballads unfold predictably, like television dramas, but many folk songs have soulful elements that lift the stories they tell to a higher emotional register and that linger longer in the heart as a result.
You can’t understand a ballad by its lyrics alone: every singer interprets the melody, rhythm, and mood differently. This was why I once performed these songs for my students rather than simply distributing handouts with the words. But you can experience much the same effect by listening to the clips below. If you listen to each song in full, you’ll likely discover a layer of the story that I miss. I’d love it if you would share your insights in the comments below.
Today’s essay is part of my series on craft, which is itself an extension of my coaching services. To learn more about my coaching, see my new website.
Tennessee Stud
“Tennessee Stud” captures the conventions of plot as well as any textbook. The tale begins with conflict: the narrator loves a girl with golden hair, but has some trouble with her father and her outlaw brother, the inciting incident which causes him to flee. The rising action begins as the narrator rides his Tennessee Stud away from that trouble — across the Arkansas mud and down to the Texas frontier, where he wins some horse races and kills a gambler in a gunfight.
Each of these scenes has clear stakes, and survival might have resolved the core conflict for another young man. But our narrator grows so lonesome for his love back in Tennessee that he retraces his steps to find her. We learn of a subplot here: the girl with the golden hair rides a Tennessee mare for whom the stud yearns as keenly as his rider does for his beloved.
The ballad reaches its climax as the narrator whips his lover’s father and her outlaw brother, also liberating the girl. The falling action, or denouement, begins as they ride their horses “stirrup to stirrup and side by side” across the Big Muddy River toward the plains. And the ending shows that all four lovers have made a home there, as a pretty baby plays with a little horse colt near the cabin door.
This is an endearing song despite its archaic gender conventions, and it ties up the conflict of forbidden love in a satisfying bow. But the song might be less iconic if it did not incorporate some elements of strangeness. The chorus hammers home the deepest love of all: that of the rider for his horse.
The Tennessee Stud was long and lean
Color of the sun and his eyes were green
He had the nerve — he had the blood
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee Stud.
All of the characters in this tale would be flat, no more than cardboard cutouts, if it were not for this horse, who inspires such love and who also misses the Tennessee mare so fiercely at one point that his green eyes turn blue. How can we forget a horse with a heart like that?
By the end of the story it’s not quite as simple as the boy getting his girl. A truly complex web of love holds that homestead together: human to horse, human to human, horse to horse, and (if it’s not redundant) baby to colt.
John Henry
“John Henry” introduces a clear conflict, but it also illustrates more complex elements of plot, such as foreshadowing. The variation I sing hews closer to Bruce Springsteen’s, but I like the lyrics in Harry Belafonte’s version more, including this lovely opening verse:
John Henry, he could hammer
He could whistle and he could sing
And he’d go up to the mountain early in the morning
Just to hear his hammer ring, Lord, Lord
Just to hear his hammer ring
What a simple love of his trade, what a contented life. Anything that perfect is bound for a reckoning. Indeed, John Henry knows from the time he was a baby “bouncing on his daddy’s knee” that the work he loves will also be the death of him. You might even say that the tension between John Henry’s happiness and his eventual fate is the inciting plot element, even though we get just a hint of what will come later.
The plot begins in earnest when John Henry’s family needs money. He offers his services to the Captain at the mine, who claims he doesn’t need John Henry because he’s purchased a steam drill. Two layers of conflict emerge here: John Henry’s financial need and the larger existential threat that technology poses to workers.
The song doesn’t say this explicitly, but there is also a racial subtext to this exchange, as the real John Henry was Black. My favorite moment is John Henry’s reply to the Captain:
Well a man ain’t nothin’ but a man
Before I’d let your steam drill beat me down
I’d die with my hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord
I’d die with my hammer in my hand
The story gains depth here by tapping into an inner conflict, John Henry’s inability to sacrifice his pride. Lisa Cron explains in Story Genius that our brains are wired to respond more powerfully to narratives that push an inner conflict forward than to stories that rely solely on external action. This is also true of Misery, where Paul Sheldon is so traumatized by his ordeal that he nearly loses his ability to write. Similarly, John Henry faces a predicament that he cannot turn away from, even though he knows it means his death.
We know that John Henry will die and even how he will die, but the climax reveals another layer: why he cannot escape this fate. If he did, he would no longer be a man, at least not in his own eyes.
The song endures because John Henry triumphs, hammering out fifteen feet to the steam drill’s nine. This victory seals John Henry’s immortality. He is buried at the White House, where every passing locomotive bears witness that he was a steel-drivin’ man. This ending resonates more deeply than the closing lines of “Tennessee Stud” because we must resolve much of its dissonance within ourselves. Not only do we grieve John Henry’s death, we grieve the death of the era that he represents, before men were replaced by machines. We know that even though the steam drill represents the future, technology cannot replace humanity.
And we hear echoes of that fear in our own time, when AI poses much the same threat to us that industrial machines have, historically, and still do through automation. But there is also the suggestion that a balance between people and machines might be possible, since the passing trains pay tribute not to the inventor of the steam drill, but to the steel-drivin’ man who once laid their rails.
John Henry’s ballad finishes in us and not on the final chord because it has many core tensions and many of them remain unresolved.
Long Black Veil
“Long Black Veil” is a sophisticated ballad because it incorporates flashbacks and suspense, as well as foreshadowing, and even includes fantastical elements. Every verse reveals something new, thickening the plot, and like John Henry’s inescapable predicament we understand that the characters are trapped just as much by inner conflict as by external events.
The first verse sets the scene and establishes the unlucky situation:
Ten years ago on a cold dark night
There was someone killed 'neath the town hall light
There were few at the scene but they all did agree
That the man who ran looked a lot like me
Rather than developing this plot further, “Long Black Veil” shifts immediately to the chorus, which raises many suspenseful questions while hinting at events yet to come:
She walks these hills in a long black veil
And she visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows and nobody sees
Nobody knows but me
Who is she? Why is she visiting the speaker’s grave? What happened to put the speaker six feet under? And if he’s dead, how is he telling us this tale? We learn a little more about the first three questions in the next verse.
The judge said, "Son, what's your alibi?
If you were somewhere else, then you don't have to die"
But I spoke not a word though it meant my life
'Cause I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife
Now we know who the unnamed woman is and why the speaker chose death, even though he had an alibi. We return to the chorus with a fresh pique of anguish and await the final verse with both dread and morbid anticipation.
The scaffold is high, and eternity nears
She stands in the crowd and sheds not a tear
But sometimes at night when the cold winds moan
In a long black veil she cries over my bones
How haunting is that image of the woman standing in the crowd, betraying nothing, while her lover looks back at her from the scaffold? Oh, man. And the depth of her secret grief and guilt, which she releases into the cold and moaning winds, slays me every time.
As with “John Henry,” we know that the speaker died voluntarily to save his lover’s honor and perhaps also to protect his best friend. But once he was falsely charged with murder, there was no escape from misery, no matter what choice he might have made. What an unforgettable predicament. The story achieves such resonance by its end that we don’t even care that a ghost is narrating it.
This song also illustrates how a good title can add novelty to a plot. I have long borrowed this idea from the late Susan Atefat Peckham, one of my graduate school classmates. Maybe someone taught the concept to her, but I’ll never forget Susan explaining how she wanted her poem titles to “detonate” at some strategic point in her verse. A good literary title hints at meaning that surprises us when it completes itself, the way the punch line of a joke startles us into laughter by tugging a few threads together.
We have no idea why the woman is wearing a long black veil during the first chorus. We have a stronger sense of it after the second reprise, but we don’t feel the full weight of that veil until the final chorus, when we know that it’s not just grief, but also a multilayered guilt, that the veil conceals. She could have saved an innocent man and didn’t, maybe to save herself, maybe because she too had no good choices remaining. Just as “John Henry” expands into the universal, this woman’s secret pain represents hidden burdens that we all carry within us.
Ballads, sea shanties, pantoums. As a creative nonfiction writer I often immerse myself in the "facts" (characters, circumstances, context) and there are stories which reveal themselves to be country western love songs or villanelles or bee-bop tunes. Musical forms of storytelling provide great inspiration for finding narrative structure. It made me take a closer look at "Veins of Coal" by Richie & Rosie, one of my favorite bluegrass ballads. (Richie Stearns on banjo.) Great craft exercise.
Folksinger Peggy Seeger published a collection of traditional folk ballads (lyrics and music) in the early 60s. During lockdown I read through the lyrics and was shocked at just how sad many of these songs were, but also how persistent the songs were and the stories they told, as Seeger notes, with countless variations over the years, sometimes over centuries, and new songs borrowing old songs’ tunes, sometimes even a verse or two (so-called floater verses).
Many of these songs are also about women or told from a woman’s point of view.
One ballad Seeger did not include is “Mary Hamilton,” which Joan Baez recorded. Virginia Woolf folks here probably know this song since Woolf alludes to the tale of “The Four Marys” behind the song in “A Room of One’s Own.” The sound is not great on the live recording below of Baez, so I’ve included a link to the lyrics. The three surviving Marys mentioned in the last verse are all named in Woolf’s essay.
https://www.shazam.com/song/713902225/mary-hamilton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnP9E4lUzo