Barns ignoble – Frank McNally on Tom Waits's barn obsession (and why Macbeth is innocent)

Irish Times

9 hours ago

When
I wrote
that the 'Red Barn Murder' of 1827 was still inspiring ballads, books, and screenplays well into the 20th century (
Diary
, August 14th), I somehow forgot the most obvious example.
My thanks to reader Turlough Montague for reminding me that
Tom Waits's
1992 song Murder in the Red Barn, although a treatment of the rural murder mystery in general, is clearly rooted in those original events in early 19th century
Suffolk
.
Waits seems to have moved the scene to 20th century America: 'The woods will never tell what sleeps beneath the trees/Or what's buried neath a rock or hiding in the leaves/'Cause roadkill has its seasons, just like anything/It's possums in the autumn and it's farm cats in the spring.'
But amid the many speculations about who might have been responsible for what may or may not have happened, his narrator too considers framing a gypsy, as had happened in Suffolk before they got their man.
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And as it had been in the original case, the scene of the crime becomes almost a character in the song, complicit in evil deeds: 'Cause there's nothing strange about an axe with blood stains in a barn./There's always some killin' you got to do around a farm.'
Barns have a dark hold on Waits's imagination. If ever given the chance to write an English Leaving Cert exam paper, I might ask students to compare and contrast the 1992 ballad with his even more sinister Don't Go into that Barn from 20 years later.
That too was inspired by real events, this time in the US, as revisited by The New York Times in 2003. The article in question was about a new slavery museum in Natchez, Mississippi.
But two centuries earlier, the building had been a tobacco barn owned by a Captain Anderson, who used it to imprison actual slaves. In more recent memory, it loomed like a malign ghost in the local landscape.
Hence the recollections of an 84-year-old farmer, who remembered playing around it as a child. 'Dad told us never to go in there,' The New York Times quoted him saying. 'He never did tell us why.'
Waits didn't go into the barn either, or its particular history. But the phrase inspired him to a growling masterpiece of mysterious malevolence, topped off with a sinisterly jaunty account of the stops on a trip downriver: '… Henderson to Smithland/Smithland to Memphis/Memphis down to Vicksburg/Vicksburg to Natchez …'
Still with barns but on a more uplifting note, John Stevenson has written on foot of the
Diary of August 12th
, on the Conyghams of Slane Castle, with a story about that family's unusual motto and coat of arms.
Back in the 1960s, John won a scholarship to the Atlantic College in Wales, where his fellow students include a Welsh Conygham of Irish parentage. The latter had a ring, inherited from his forefathers, with the unusual motto 'Over Fork Over' and coat of arms, the centrepiece of which was a Y shape.
I had seen this at a lunch in Slane Castle after Henry Mount Charles's funeral and, at first, perhaps because of the setting, thought the motto related to dining etiquette: perhaps something they teach you in finishing school about how to place your cutlery to indicate to the butler whether you're still eating.
[
Henry Mount Charles obituary: Affable, striking figure who brought rock music to Slane
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]
In fact, it relates to an event from the family's earlier history in Scotland, when one of them saved the life of a future King Malcolm by hiding him in a barn, under hay, forked on as the pursuers closed in. 'Over Fork Over' may have been an actual exclamation used.
It's a nice story anyway. But I'm glad John mentioned it because, as readers will doubtless know, the Thursday just gone marked the 968th anniversary of the death of the real-life Macbeth. Indeed, this week was a double Macbeth milestone, his kingship having lasted 17 years and a day, from August 14th 1040.
That last date, you may be thinking – if like me, you were misled by Shakespeare – must have been when he murdered old King Duncan in his bed, having been put up to it by Lady Macbeth, after misleading advice from a Scottish consultancy firm, the Weird Sisters.
On the contrary, as I now know having revisited the case, that was all lies, invented by the English (via chronicler Raphael Holinshed), and then repeated unthinkingly by Shakespeare, perhaps to curry favour with King James I, whose ancestors included the real-life Malcolm and Banquo.
It turns out that the historical Duncan was a young man who died in battle, that Macbeth succeeded him fairly, and that Lady Macbeth had no invisible blood on her hands to wash off obsessively while sleepwalking.
Nor do there appear to have been any weird sisters involved, although the real Macbeth's demise may have been foretold by a fifth century Irish abbot named Berchán. Like all the best prophecies, Berchán's are poetically vague – terms and conditions apply. But unlike Shakespeare, at least he didn't resort to such cheap plot twists as suggesting that a man delivered by Caesarean section was 'not of woman born'.