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Since time immemorial, people have written, sung, and shared songs about sudden death and devastating loss. In the past, such songs were shared by written or oral tradition and adapted by performers over time into complex genealogies. More recently, tragic ballads have been disseminated on record and radio. This talk—based on the speaker’s book Murder Ballads Old & New: A Dark & Bloody Record—will share how such ballads documented tales of homicide, crime sprees, madness, illness, addiction, and war, and look at everything from ancient child ballads to modern variants by Johnny Cash, Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, Van Morrison, and the Mekons. It will examine these songs in a way that's equal parts musicological, psychosocial, and genealogical in a deep dive into the human need to document the horrors of the world around us and their impact on our sense of mortality.