“Come listen to my story,” the song starts. “I’ll tell you no lies.”

The scene unfolds: a beautiful young woman steals away into the woods at night. The branches creak overhead, the river rushes somewhere through the trees, and the figure of a man beckons her to an open grave or a watery death. In the dark, the wild birds sing.

It is, as they say, a tale as old as time; one that we have seen play itself out in countless fairy tales, ghost stories, plays, true crime podcast, and — yes — ballads. You may have heard the term “murder ballad” before. But what does it mean? As Madison Ava Helm wrote in the introduction to her thesis on the subject: “The ballad is a tricky minx to categorize.”¹ Bear with me, and we’ll do our best.

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