This book is about unhappy music-songs of death and loss caused by sudden, often violent reversals of fortune. Songs that reveal our worst fears. Songs that carry the pain of loss in dark hearts and tortured souls. Murder, drugs, melancholia, disease, madness, drowning, and the cruel hand of old age all lurk within. There but for the grace… The definition of murder ballad is expanded to include songs about traumatic loss in modern variants and styles, including blues, country, punk, post-punk, alt-country, and folk. The book strolls in the graveyard past tombs both well-kept and half-hidden. Murder Ballads Old & New excavates facts about killers, victims, and the folkloric storytellers who set their history to music. Murder Ballads Old & New includes a wide range of songs and performers from the obscure (Nelstone's Hawaiians, Dorsey Dixon, Boiled in Lead) to the famous (Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth), Highlights include tales of Muddy Waters guitar sideman Pat Hare, whose incendiary blues boast "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" proved grimly prophetic. And honky-tonk pioneer Eddie Noack, whose morbid stab at late-career rebirth, "Psycho," couldn't match the bottomless tragedy of his own life. And more songs memorializing lives brutally cut short.