The Wake

Rennie Sparks, one half of the alt-folk duo The Handsome Family, visited the U yesterday to give a lecture on the tradition of dark and violent imagery in the lyrics of folk songs. While her husband writes the music, Rennie writes the lyrics for The Handsome Family, whose often-times Gothic and bizarre content follow in the footsteps of the folk tradition. She has also adapted these themes into a book of short stories, titled simply Evil.

Sparks highlighted a number of folk songs, such as “Knoxville Girl”, “Barbara Allen”, “Oh My Darlin’ Clementine”, and “Pretty Polly”, and discussed their contrasting use of pleasing melodies and dark lyrics. Her lecture concerned our fascination with this brand of songs, and how they’ve affected the lexicon of American music. She drew parallels to alchemy, mysticism, and Carl Jung’s theories on collective unconscious. Her interest in these strange and violent murder ballads are in their artistic catharsis and the comforting world of dreams. Sparks concluded that folk music gives us an “awed connection to life’s beautiful mystery”, and it is this place of beautiful mystery that Sparks herself puts herself in in her own lyric writing. This was an interesting lecture and gave incite into the artist’s relation to the folk music tradition.