Word: ballads
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...Ballad of Peckham Rye, by Muriel Spark. Peckham Rye is a London suburb where the people are too average to sin grandly but not too average to sin. The result is often hilarious...
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...
...form soon adapted itself to new material: guitarists began twanging out such up-to-date items as Old Man Atom with a locomotive chorus ("Hir-o-shi-ma, Na-ga-sa-ki"). When little Kathy Fiscus died at the bottom of a California well in 1949, the Ballad of Kathy Fiscus was probably inevitable, like the more recent Ballad of Caryl Chessman and today's Ballad of Francis Powers...