I’m pretty sure that The Teenage Fanclub sound would not have evolved if it wasn’t for songs like this 
Heard a Dolly Parton interview recently that’s related to American murder ballads (which I didn’t know was a genre). It’s fascinating how music lore spans time and place.
Copy/pasting from the transcript of the episode (which is highly recommended). Move the play slider forward to 21:10 to hear the section below.
DOLLY PARTON: Well, you – as a songwriter, and so you gotta remember too that’s how I grew up. All those old mountain songs and all those old songs from the old world. All those old English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh ballads about the Knoxville girl getting killed and throwed in the Knoxville River. And I was very, you know, impressionable.
JAD: Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me just take a digression here, because that song that Dolly just mentioned sent me down another rabbit hole. In the interview, I didn’t catch it, when she said …
DOLLY PARTON: The Knoxville girl getting killed and throwed in the Knoxville River.
JAD: But listening back I was like, “Wait, what? A Knoxville girl thrown in a river?” It turns out this is a very old Appalachian ballad that is sung from the perspective of a man who goes to meet his young wife or girlfriend, I guess. And they’re taking a walk along river. And then all of a sudden …
[LYRICS: “I picked a stick up off of the ground and knocked that fair girl down.”]
JAD: Picks up a stick. Beats her …
[LYRICS: “She fell down on her bended knees, for mercy she did cry.”]
JAD: She begs for mercy. This is in the song. She begs for mercy but he keeps beating her with the stick until she’s unconscious, and then …
[LYRICS: “I taken her by her golden curls, I drug her round and round.”]
JAD: Drags her by her hair.
[LYRICS: “Throwing her into the river that flows through Knoxville town.”]
JAD: And then he throws her in the river. And I was like, “Wait. This is what she was talking about?”
DOLLY PARTON: I grew up with that.
…
JAD: His name is Paul Slade. He’s a music writer based in London. And he recently wrote a book all about this.
PAUL SLADE: Called Unprepared To Die, which looks at the real murder stories behind Knoxville Girl and a range of other American murder ballads.
JAD: First thing he told me is that there are tons of these songs.
[LYRICS: “Stabbed her with my knife.”]
JAD: So many. Always about a man …
[LYRICS: “I shot her through the head.”]
JAD: … killing a woman, often his wife, by shooting her, or …
[LYRICS: “My mind is to drown you and leave you behind.”]
JAD: … drowning her. That’s a big one. But with the Knoxville girl song, what Paul did was he traced it back from East Tennessee where Dolly would have heard it, back to England.
PAUL SLADE: The first version of the song I’ve seen was 1685 or thereabouts. We can’t be precisely sure about that.
JAD: The song was originally called The Bloody Miller.
PAUL SLADE: So I went looking for surviving copies of The Bloody Miller’s ballad sheet.
JAD: Now obviously, there are no original recordings of this song, but he did manage to find a copy of the sheet music from the original printing, 330-ish years ago. And at the top of that sheet music, there was like a little intro.
PAUL SLADE: And it says this. “A true, and just account of one Francis Cooper of Hogstow near Shrewsbury …”
Can’t help but think of the brilliant Nick Cave Murder Ballads album, specifically the duet with Kylie Minogue - Where The Wild Roses Grow. Similar story.
In my podcast queue for tomorrow while on a long bus ride 
Until I dug that double album out of the depths of my HDD I had no idea that American Murder Ballards was a thing either. Quite…interesting…once you start to listen to the lyrics!
There will be new threads tonight but a little later, around 11.30pm CST or so
