Bob Frank and John Murry
World Without End
© 2007 Evangeline Records (751937294429)
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A collection of murder ballads co-written by Bob Frank and John Murry based on true-but-forgotten tales of American violence and destruction. Produced by Tim Mooney (American Music Club, Toiling Midgets) and mastered by Matt Pence (Centro-Matic, South San
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"World Without End" was produced and recorded by Tim Mooney of American Music Club and mastered by Matt Pence of Centro-Matic and South San Gabriel. It includes a 16 page booklet with artwork by Oxford, MS artist Charlie Buckley and photography by Jeremy Harris, Linda Ergo, and John Murry.
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"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." William Faulkner.
World Without End is a séance. With each song a ghost rises up. Some speak of misdeeds. Some speak of misdeeds endured. The songs drip with blood, but it's not the cornsyrup and food dye of Hollywood. No, there's no exaggeration. No need for melodrama. The ghosts dispense their tales of woe with an almost objective eye to factual detail. They are merely distilling the crimes, sometimes with regret, sometimes with bravado. Stories of death, dying, and almost always revenge. The bitter agony of injustice. The profound agony of justice. World without End is a history lesson of violent America.
Fittingly released on the Day of the Dead, when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest, and when the dead can communicate most easily, these ghosts tell their deadmen's tales. And ghost stories always have a moral. On the ten song record, some are easier to spot than others. Such as the revenge dictum --if you hurt my family I will hunt you down and not only kill you but desecrate your body. There's the Southern gothic prognostic: if you screw my husband, I'll wall you up in the chimney with a jeweled dagger in your chest. In one song, a brother kills a sweet-talking guru for seducing his sister.
American lore idolizes criminals and vigilantes, and World Without End is filled with anti-hero anthems. We cheer for the unrepentant outlaw who kills himself so the sheriff can't brag that he killed him. We admire the heinous criminal who says, "Drop the trap door I got nothing to say." We all want to live like that, without explanations, and let our actions, right or wrong, speak for themselves. In the lightest song, Bubba Rose, a dock worker, wakes up one morning and goes to work and shoots his boss. The chorus professes "nobody knows why Bubba Rose shot his boss," but we all know why Bubba shot his boss--we all want to shoot our bosses. Each song reminds us we could kill for love or malice or for some perceived slight given half the chance. World without End unleashes these ghosts to warn us, to save us, from ourselves.
The settings of some of the songs are more than a hundred and fifty years old, but there's immediacy in them. The past rises up to warn us about our future. With the song about the Reconstruction of the South, one can't help but think about an occupying army currently in the Middle East trying to reconstruct a land that doesn't want to be reconstructed. And when the record talks about the battle of Shiloh, it reminds us about how the present-day United States is divided and unsure of itself. World without End breathes the air of these unsure times. Just as during the Civil War, America is unsure of who and what we are and what we will become.
Without shame, World Without End looks unflinchingly into the history of racism. Without moralizing, two of these songs look right into the past and own up to it. One song lets a Klansman speak about lynching. Another song lets the man who was lynched speak. The lesson of each ghost is that this could happen to you. From being on the receiving end of mob violence, to being caught up in the mob that unleashes the violence. The warning is that the grotesque and horrible is never far off, and is, truly, in each of us. The moral is that there's murder, justified or unjustified, in each of us given the right circumstances. America will always be a violent nation. There are guns in all our trunks. But if you listen to World Without End, you might rethink going on that rampage.
--Dustin Wells, San Francisco 10-2-06
reviews
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- author: Jeff Brandon
murder ballads with a deep spiritual justice.
This recording is timeless as death.
author: Jim DickinsonSecret crime of passion. Body buried in the garden where the roses never grow. Blood curse from long gone yesterdays- doomed sinner homeless, even in death. Outlaws, murderers, their phantoms wander searching for impossible redemption. Dare the darkness. Hear the tormented cry of soul beyond mercy. The lost cry out in song. Cold as an assassin's blade. Burning with the heat of a pistol's breath. Dark and deep as the grave. This recording is timeless as death. It will haunt your dreams and follow you down the shadow-filled street just out of sight. -Jim Dickinson, Independence, Mississippi
- author: Frances Clayton
WONDERFUL! Beautiful lyrics that do not sacrafice or hide the brutal honesty of the stories they tell. Thank you!
- author: Duke Lang, CFRO 102.7 FM, Vancouver, BC
Been writing songs more than half my life, know how to hear the echo of what's been taken away and how it bitches about what's been allowed to remain. Some facts are lost to legend, fed to shadows, and it takes an outlaw heart to hold a dime up to the sun just so. It can blind people used to seeing nothing, that reflected metal can. A room grows awfully quiet when one man says what's true. This album is an original. Must be five or six out this year in the whole wide world and this is one.
- author: Hoover, The Lost Outlaw (Sphincter Records)
At first glance "World Without End," a new CD release by Bob Frank and John Murry, appears to be a Halloween release. You can take my word, it's too damned scary for any of that. This ain't for kids. It's musical celebration of death, violence and mayhem that's a trick and a treat straight from the gates of Hell -- like nothing that's ever come before it -- and has nothing to do with rubber masks and evening porch candy, folks. This is genuine skin crawling material that harkens back to another era --and a dark epic it is. It's vile, musty stuff sung from the crypt by victims of lynchings, stake burnings and suicides that even big kids, if they're fragile of spirit, ought not be listening to unsupervised. Until Quentin Tarantino turns this sucker into a movie, you'll have to rely on your imagination. Except it's your own runaway imagination that puts it over the top. "World Without End" is humid and putrid, and has a trickle temperature of about 98.6 degrees. If it had a scratch & sniff sticker on the wrapper, the stench would ascend straight from the grave -- in warm, bloody horror. A creative, totally original master work. --Hoover, The Lost Outlaw