When we kicked off Origin of Song about six months ago, I’d intended to inaugurate the series with a look at “Killing the Blues”, a poetic, heavyweight song written by Rowland Salley. “Killing the Blues” had lived many lives before it ended up as the second track on Raising Sand, the album by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant that turned out to be successful beyond reasonable expectations. It was their gothic folk version of “Killing the Blues” that got me hooked, and I started to wonder about the elements that made it so intimate and conversation-like. Musically, it’s a heartbreaking mood piece; it has weight along with a timeless, quiet drama. Its verses are poetry, their beauty underscored by vowels rhyming (as in fire rhymes with eyes) and alliterations flying (somebody said they saw me swinging the world by the tail).

“When you combine a melody that lifts you up with a lyric like that, it’s a twisted thing. When you get that combination, that is really something,” said Krauss of the song to the London Times.

There are at least two well-known recorded versions of “Killing the Blues”: John Prine’s authoritative recording and Shawn Colvin’s, which is all done up in country folk, as well as many more, including a finger-picked acoustic beauty by folk/blues guy Chris Smither and songwriter Salley’s own from his album of the same name. The aural mysteries of “Killing the Blues”, its wide appeal among bluesers, rockers, and folkers, and its multiple covers all made it one of those ideal candidates for a song from which to work backward. I groped around alone in the dark for awhile, seeking a similarly haunting and harmonious forebear… is it like something by the Everly Brothers? The Righteous Brothers? The Louvin Brothers? Nope, nope, and nope. I also wondered if there was any relationship between it and the eerie “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues”, by Skip James, since I thought about that one every time I heard Salley’s song.

There was only one way to find out: I set about tracking down Salley, who in addition to being a songwriter is the bassist in Chris Isaak’s band. I readied my questions and was just about to dial the phone when I thought, “Aw heck, let’s call it a night,” and then broke for the evening’s Oscar telecast. It wasn’t long after the program started when the ads began to roll, as ads are prone to do, and there was one in particular that caught my ear: Its soundtrack was “Killing the Blues.” And in less than 30 seconds, a song that I had been loving and found so sweet just moments before had become as appealing as sour milk to me. This was a clear-cut case of when a good song goes bad. 

Now don’t get excited… this isn’t another rant about the evils of television advertising and the rock music that accompanies it. “The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds,” said Marshall McLuhan once upon a time. So better it be “Killing the Blues” than old-school schmaltz like “Rice-a-roni, the San Francisco treat,” right? Not if you’re Tom Waits: “You know, when a guy is singing to me about toilet paper… you may need the money but, I mean, rob a 7-Eleven! Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave,” he told Musician in 1987.

But not everyone decides to hold the line like Waits, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young have. Ever since John Lennon and Bob Dylan caved in the game’s been wide open. There are even folks who will tell you they enjoy hearing new songs as well as their favorites used to sell the latest version of the grilled-chicken-fajita-burrito-wrap-sandwich.

I’m not here to bad rap any songwriter who takes his or her pay that way: “Times are harder than they ever been before,” to quote “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues.” It’s just that upon hearing “Killing the Blues” in that context, I lost all feeling for it. Its intimacies and mysteries belong to the world now and are no longer of such great interest to me, while my visions and illusions of it have been replaced by images of a wholesome family of four or more, frolicking outdoors amidst their fresh bed sheets—all thanks to some ad person in the creative department who conjured the J.C. Penney’s campaign. As a listener, my connection to the song was completely severed and needing to kill my blues around that, I diverted myself by collecting other scenarios in which perfectly good songs can go bad.