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Telling and Retelling the Tale. Adapting the Murder Ballad 'Duncan and Brady'for the Stage As Past and Future Visions of a Folk Crime

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Telling and Retelling the Tale. Adapting the Murder Ballad 'Duncan and Brady'for the Stage As Past and Future Visions of a Folk Crime Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Charlton, James Martin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9066-4705 (2016) Telling and retelling the tale. adapting the murder ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’ for the stage as past and future visions of a folk crime. Writing in Practice: The Journal of Creative Writing Research, 2 . ISSN 2058-5535 [Article] Final accepted version (with author’s formatting) This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/18923/ Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Works, including theses and research projects, may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from them, or their content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s). They may not be sold or exploited commercially in any format or medium without the prior written permission of the copyright holder(s). Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author’s name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pag- ination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address: [email protected] The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy Telling And Retelling The Tale. Adapting the Murder Ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’ for the Stage as Past and Future Visions of a Folk Crime James Martin Charlton Abstract In adapting the murder ballad Duncan and Brady for the stage as a one act play ‘Been on the Job Too Long, and setting the story within that adaptation in three different places and times periods, the playwright made a decision to stage a meditation on how the true murder story of Duncan and Brady is an ideal tale to be told and retold. Telling and retelling the tale in different times and places had its own rewards for the writer, and potentially for performers. In writing three versions of this tale, the playwright stretched, challenged and gave himself increased scope as a writer and researcher, as well as stretching, challenging and giving a showcase to actors who perform the piece . This paper explores some of the key decisions, techniques and discoveries made in the process of adapting the ballad for the stage. It tells how this process gave the writer increased clarity in terms of his writerly objectives and personal vision. Keywords Playwriting, drama, writing process, folk songs, murder ballads, theatre, adaptation, technique, structure. Introducing the Tale May 2015 saw the world premier of my new one act play Been on the Job Too Long at a new venue, TheatreN16 in Stoke Newington, London. The play takes its story from a true crime, a historical murder which happened in St. Louis, Missouri in 1890. The crime, the murder of a police patrolman called Brady, is the subject of a well known murder ballad, ‘Duncan and Brady’. My play’s title comes from the last line of song’s refrain, “He been on the job too long” (Dylan, 2008). Adapting this song for the stage gave me an opportunity to tell a story with real dramatic impact. It also allowed me to write a play which embeds within its structure some of my closest held beliefs as to what make a tale worth telling, and retelling. In the following, I will talk about the process of working and reworking the material sources. This process resulted in a work which is a meditation on stories and storytelling which plays on the repetition inherent in stage performances. It allowed me to concentrate and reflect on the core of my job as a writer, telling and retelling tales. The true crime upon which both the song and my play are based took place in the Charles Starkes Saloon, St. Louis, Missouri on the 6 October 1890. Police patrolman James Brady was shot dead. A man by the name of Harry Duncan was arrested for the crime. Duncan claimed that he was innocent and that: 1 …the crime had actually been committed by bar owner Charles Starkes, who denied it at the time. Duncan was convicted and sentenced to hang for the crime, but fought the decision with a series of appeals that took the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Lawyer Walter Moran Farmer presented his case and holds the distinction of being the first African-American attorney to argue a case before the Court. The appeal was denied and Duncan was executed by hanging on July 27, 1894. According to some, Charles Starkes would later confess to the murder on his deathbed (Rewald, 2010). In practical terms, this story allowed me to fulfil the brief of a commission I was undertaking at the time. A trio of actors had asked if they might perform a short play of mine, Merry Devils (Charlton, 1999). Merry Devils is a mere 20 minutes long; the actors enquired whether I might extend it in order to make it into a full- length piece. I reread Merry Devils and felt that I had said everything that I had to say about its characters and their situation within the piece’s brief running time. I suggested to my collaborators that it might be better to write one or two other pieces which could be thematically linked to Merry Devils and which would required the same acting resource: three male performers. Merry Devils is set in hell and concerns competitive wrangling between three demons whose job it is to tempt human beings to sin and despair. The idea of sin being intrinsic element of the human condition danced around my mind and so I looked for a story which might play out this theme. Inspiration made me recall the lyrics to a song I had first heard when Bob Dylan performed it as the opening number of the first night of his stint at Wembley Arena in October 2000, the murder ballad ‘Duncan and Brady’. Due to the acoustics of the Arena and the idiosyncrasies of Dylan’s voice, I did not take a great deal away from that first hearing than a rush of energy and the repeat of the chorus refrain, “He’s been on the job too long”. Playing bootleg recordings of this gig and others from the same period – Dylan played the 81 times from November 1999 until September 2002 (The Official Bob Dylan Site, 2015) – I grew increasingly intrigued as I pieced together the song’s story. Dylan’s recording of ‘Duncan and Brady’ was released in 2008 and I got the chance to hear things resoundingly clearly. Brady is murdered by Duncan when the former bursts in “here” whilst “a games going on” (Dylan, 2008); Brady ends up buried in the cemetery and there’s some form of strange celebration after his funeral. The Brady of the song is given little sympathy, there being a strong implication that he deserved his violent end. Research into the song showed that it first recorded by Wilmer Watts and Lonely Eagles in 1929 and became well known through recordings by Lead Belly and Dave Van Ronk. I discovered that Duncan’s conviction and execution was probably a miscarriage of justice and that the culprit was most likely owner of the saloon where the killing took place, Charles Starkes (Rewald, 2010). Apart from Duncan and Brady, the song only mentions in passing some colourful female mourners at Brady’s funeral; having a third male character was extremely fortuitous given the circumstances of the commission. 2 Murder Ballads and their Stories Been on the Job Too Long was not the first time that I had used one of Bob Dylan’s performances of an American folk murder ballad as the springboard to a script. Around 2005 I developed a short film screenplay (Charlton, 2007) called Staggered – thus far unmade – which retold the story of ‘Stack-A-Lee’, aka Stagger Lee. The murder ballad ‘Stack-a-Lee’ tells the story of the killing of one Billy Lyons by one Lee Shelton (Stack-a-Lee) in St. Louis in 1895; the argument that precipitated the violence centred around Shelton’s “high roller, milk white Stetson” hat (Brown, 2003: 23). My script revisions the tale as twenty first century story with an English underclass setting. Rather than being, as in the original, “about that John B. Stetson hat” (Dylan, 1993), Staggered has a baseball cap becoming the bone of contention. That a person might kill for the slightest of reasons fascinates me as a writer even as it horrifies me as a human being. Fascination and horror are feelings that murder ballads themselves can evoke. In ‘Duncan and Brady’, the latter comes into the bar looking to “kill somebody just to see them die” (Dylan, 2008). This sense of a lack of a justifiable motive is sometimes present in news accounts of violent crime in our own time.
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