NASHVILLE — The American South didn’t invent the murder ballad, but it certainly keeps the genre alive, both literally and musically. The oldest of these songs came from the folk traditions of the British Isles before crossing the Atlantic and being enshrined in the folkways of Appalachia. There they lived on in front-porch picking parties and mournful firesides until the phonograph slingshotted them to a national audience.
The earliest murder ballads were often cautionary tales, warnings to young women of the dangers of unsanctioned sexuality. We love these stories still. Murder ballads combine our morbid fascination with violence and our apparent inability, even now, to keep vulnerable people safe. Such songs “are part of a larger tradition of celebrating and commodifying violence against women,” writes the Nashville-based photographer Kristine Potter in her new monograph, “Dark Waters.” The book considers the legacy and ubiquity of human ferocity in the Southern landscape, historically and in our own time.
The crime writer Harold Schechter has called murder ballads “the oldest form of true-crime literature,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. Such songs are often the story of a man who solves the problem of a problematic woman the old-fashioned way. Think of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” Johnny Cash’s “Delia’s Gone.” Dolly Parton’s “Banks of the Ohio.” Think of Lyle Lovett’s “L.A. County.” When a woman has become inconvenient in some way, such songs tell us, a midnight trip to the river — or to the grave — is in order.
Many a recording-era hit has updated or extended this ancient terrain, but Ms. Potter’s work upends the tradition altogether by considering the literal terrain in which murder ballads have traditionally taken place. Again and again, her photographs capture both the isolation and the beauty of the rural South: the dirt roads without a soul in sight, the creeks and rivers that curve away into even greater isolation, the trees choked by moss and vines, the gravestones and makeshift memorials barely visible through the trees.
The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection. Entering such beautiful spaces is always a risk for a woman alone — not because of anything inherently dangerous about a mist-drenched stream or a bamboo-clotted riverbank or even a rocky waterfall, but because bucolic settings aren’t always as empty as they seem. And nobody would hear you scream if danger has followed you into the woods — or if danger is already there, just waiting for you to arrive.
In many of these images, it is hard to tell up from down, hard to tell the water from reflections in the water. This dislocation, too, has its analog in the murder-ballad tradition. In some of the oldest that survive in recorded form, the vulnerable woman willingly joins her lover on a journey into the woods, believing they are running away together. Once she understands the truth, she pleads for her life. She promises to stop pressing for marriage, to raise the baby on her own. Man and deep current alike are indifferent to her plight.
The images in “Dark Waters” don’t focus strictly on the backdrops to violence; there are human portraits here, too. A pair of furious men fight on the shore. A mother clutches a naked infant just slightly too tightly, her fingers almost claws. Starkly lighted women glare at the camera, each with damp hair and accusing eyes. In case you haven’t yet made the connection, they’re also wearing clothing that echoes the attire worn by women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Peak-ballad-era attire.
The narrative transpiring within some photographs is even more transparent. A picnic table and benches are engulfed in crime-scene tape. A vine-entwined post holds up a road sign marked “Bloody Fork.” A Black woman, her brow furrowed, glances behind her even as her arm reaches forward. She appears to be fleeing.
The most haunting of Potter’s images are the ones that at first might not seem haunting at all. In one, two teenage girls dressed in that nearly identical way of young teens — tight cutoffs, striped tees — stand on the roadside, looking together into a dark gap in the dense vegetation. Are they debating whether to enter? There’s no way to know, but I gasped when I turned the page and saw them there, standing in that margin between the road and the dark unpathed space just beyond it.
In the South, our most isolated places are at once the most beautiful and the most blood-soaked, and Ms. Potter understands that women are in no way the sole victims of this violent legacy. In one photo, an older white man teaches a young Black man how to tie on a fishing hook. The younger man’s…
Read More: Opinion | A Photographer’s Dark Vision of the South