Another album of murder ballads, featured on NPR's website:

The Allure Of The Murder Ballad: Ruth Gerson Does 'Delia's Gone'

by Ann Powers

Being a pop culture fan requires a high tolerance for pain – the pain of others, that is, and especially of women. It's a function of art to render unspeakable truths metaphorical. As a fan of crime procedurals, southern rap, opera, heck, even Harry Potter novels, I'm completely comfortable with the bodies piling up outside my soul's door every day. Yet it's hard to not sometimes dwell on the fact that so many of those bodies are female. It's a chicken-and-egg conundrum: does all that symbolic rape and mayhem make us more brutal? Does it make real-live brutality possible to bear?

Ruth Gerson is a singer-songwriter and voice teacher who believes in tackling such matters head on. Her own compositions, available on four underrated studio albums, plumb the depths of both love and violence with a clear and empathetic eye. Now Gerson has recorded a collection of murder ballads — those old songs that disseminated the news of the day, transforming gruesome crimes into the stuff of legend — as a way of noting just how deeply these narratives of oppression are embedded within our psyches.

Deceived is a beautiful record. You could listen to it while eating dinner by candlelight. Gerson keeps her powerful voice whispery and calm for these renditions, and the production, by Rick Chertoff and William Wittman, aims for sweetness and light. The effect is to cast new light on familiar songs, from old ones like "The Butcher's Boy," "Knoxville Girl" and "Banks Of The Ohio" to more recent favorites like "Delilah" and "Ode To Billie Joe" — the latter one of two stories in which women live but their children die, the victims of parental cruelty.

Gerson ends the album with a spare rendition of "Delia's Gone," the century-old murder ballad that Johnny Cash made a hit late in his career.

I asked Gerson to answer some questions about that song, her approach to it and the Deceived project in general (all her proceeds from digital downloads and hard copy sales of the album will benefit anti-domestic violence organizations; her goal is to raise $100,000 for Sanctuary For Families, The Family Violence Prevention Fund, The AVON Foundation (Speak Out!), Shalom Bayit and other organizations).

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Full interview, one audio track, and links for the above organizations and for purchasing the album at at the NPR link above.

~ Becky in Tucson