quoms:

quoms:

memecucker:

So I just found out that old school country singers really really really liked singing morbid songs about true crime or deaths.

There was a singer named Blind Andy and he made like five different songs about the kidnapping and murder of 12 year old Marion Parker by college student Edward Hickman

Old school country (and the earlier folk styles, including those out of Ireland and Scotland) maintained much closer ties than modern pop-country to what you might call the ‘bardic tradition’ of recording and communicating notable events in song. Oral history, pre-mass media. You can find songs people are singing today that were current events in some highland glen two or three hundred years ago

And a lot of those current events are true crime, in part because - then as now - there’s an audience that eats it up. People can complain about the sensationalism of local news stations or the tabloids, but I think there’s good reason to suspect it’s just variations on a much longer-running theme

See also the sin of “gossip” for which medieval housewives were so frequently chided by boring and stodgy churchmen… I’m willing to bet if we had some detailed accounts of what that “gossip” was, it would tend a lot more grisly and graphic than the modern definition of like “reporting things of questionable veracity”