Word: ballades
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While running for Governor at the turn of the year, Louisiana's ballad-singing, guitar-plunking Jimmie (You Are My Sunshine) Davis vowed that he would rather go to jail than see Negro children admitted to the state's white schools. He might not be heading for jail, but Davis tangled with a federal court last week to head off an approaching platoon of Negro first-graders...
...leaps into angry rapids to swim to his Little White Dove. She dives in, too, from the opposite bank of the river, and they drown happily into the hereafter. But nothing in the 1960 morbid-ditty collection can touch Tell Laura I Love Her (RCA Victor), a best-selling ballad set in the flaming wreckage of a stock car. Tommy, the dying driver, has entered the race to win money to buy a wedding ring; he gasps out the hit tune with his dying breath and departs for heaven...
There was, for example, The Lady in Crepe, a woman whose husband, according to the ballad popular in the 18905. had drowned in Long Island Sound. The mourning widow subsequently went fishing there...
McEnery, who claims to have turned out more than 1,000 songs, makes a specialty of trying to turn headlines into hits. He has written remarkably tasteless salutes to the memories of Amelia Earhart, Floyd Collins and Emmett Till, and he still cannot understand why a ballad about Evangelist Billy Graham prompted threats of a lawsuit (sample lyrics: "To the hills of North Carolina/ Where the Smokies dot the land/ God sent a new boy baby/ And he called him Billy Graham"). Fourteen years ago, McEnery also achieved some slight notoriety by handcuffing himself to a piano and writing...
...Ballad of Peckham Rye, by Muriel Spark. A brief encounter between a London Mephistopheles and the local mediocrities produces a hilarious novel, and some reflections about how even the common place can be touched with mystery...