Courtney E. Smith

Courtney E. Smith is the editorial director of Hark Audio and the writer and host of Songs in the Key of Death. Follow her on Twitter here.

How was the idea of Songs in the Key of Death born?
Melissa Locker, one of the co-founders of Nevermind Media, who are the company behind the podcast, is a friend I made on Twitter back in 2011 when my book was published (you can see our friendship at its birth in this interview she did with me for The Hairpin back in the day!). When the company was starting up, she asked if I'd like to do a podcast with them. We didn't have an idea in mind, we were just bandying various thoughts around. Then, Dolly Parton's America dropped. Melissa sent me a text after listening to the first episode to ask what happened to the series I wrote about murder ballads when I was working at CBS Radio, because she wanted to email it to the show host — you know that bit he does about pretending not to know what they are and explaining it? Well, when CBS sold their radio assets to another company, they'd taken all our work down (feels wonderful to be useless to a corporation right?). I republished them on my blog after that and Melissa and I started talking about the idea of a murder ballads podcast. We knew true crime is huge and Nevermind is a music podcast company, so it felt like a great fit! Along with the other co-founder, Sean Cannon, we developed the idea together. It was their idea to have artists perform modern versions of the songs, which meant picking songs in the public domain for now so they're all nice and old. I wrote and researched the show, and am hosting it, so the flow, the template of how the stories get told came from me. Sean did an amazing job, along with his editing team, of giving it a soundscape.

How did you decide which stories would be included?
This was really tricky! There is either a lot of factual information about these songs and crimes or not a lot that's confirmable. Knowing that the discourse around murder ballads has been focused on how so many of the ones that stand the test of time seem to be murdered girl ballads, in which women are violently killed or painted as undesirable by men, that I wanted to give voice to those women. I wanted people to have a sense of what their life at the time would have been like and create historiography to explain why people have talked about them and written songs about them that turned out the way they did.

The other tough part was figuring out how much about the song's variations and how it traveled would be interesting. We're straddling a true crime and a music audience and we want to keep the shows interesting for both. For some songs, there are dozens of paths I could have chased down to tell more and more stories, but we aimed to keep each episode around 20 to 30 minutes, so I had to make hard choices. In those cases, there is also an element of the song's original author being lost, usually when it was a Black troubadour who didn't know copyright law. I did my best to trace the songwriting back to the area and possible writers it could have come from and give credit. Music has a long history of white people taking art created by BIPOC without credit and making it into hits, and therefore money, for the biggest audience: other white people. I didn't shy away from talking about that and the minstrel roots of when some songs were popularized.

What did making Songs in the Key of Death teach you about the world?
The deeper I got into researching and understanding the history of murder ballads, the more appreciation I have for the federal government making arts funding a part of the public services it offered after the 1929 stock market crash. The reason we have as much data as we have on a lot of these songs, these pieces of American history, is because of programs created by FDR to keep American artists in work during the 1930s. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most important authors of the era, kept herself afloat by working for the Federal Writer's Project in Florida and as part of that, she collected versions of songs that include "Delia," which is the subject of our first episode, and explained the slang terms Black people use in a lot of the songs to the extremely white brass at the American Folklife Center. I'd like to see more of that energy coming out of the current administration.

What is your relationship to your voice and how would you describe it? Has your relationship to your voice changed since you started this show?
To be honest, I've always liked my voice. I think it's nice, I know it's soothing. I grew up in Texas and moved back after spending most of my adult life in NYC a few years ago and my accent has returned. It's light, but listening to myself read this podcast, I can hear it. I'm not sure how I feel about that! It becomes a trick to stop critiquing the pod based on how you sound and let other people do that. Sean coached me through each of our recording sessions, which was a huge help. He is an experienced producer and had a whole career in public radio as on-air talent, so his knowledge and direction was invaluable to me. Just the same, when I listened to a rough edit of one episode, I texted him and said I sounded way too excited throughout the whole thing and we were obviously going to have to record it again. When I listened to it again later (on headphones instead of on my car stereo), I had a completely different reaction. It was fine, there were just a few lines that needed a different read. So, in short: it's complicated!

Reporting true-crime can be dicey...how did you handle the material with respect while making the content entertaining?
Now, this is a wonderful question. I am not a huge true crime pod listener and I wasn't super attuned to the space before this. I stayed out of it while I wrote my episodes so I wouldn't be too heavily influenced by anyone else's style. I did know that the extremely old crimes I am talking about wouldn't necessarily be what a lot of the bigger ones were doing. The crime I struggled the most with covering and actually did listen to some podcasts about was the murder of the Lawson family. It's a gruesome story of a father who shoots his whole family on Christmas day in 1929. There was a great investigative pod from a local news station about it and an interview with a controversial author who wrote a couple of hard-to-find books about it. Then I let myself listen to a few pods who talked about it, pods you'd know if I named them. I decided none of their approaches worked for me. Something this heinous couldn't be described totally straight-forward or totally as gossip with jokes thrown in. It really needed historical and psychological context. We know so much more about why people commit that type of mass murder now than we did then. That's important to talk about!

After all my scripts were done, I did some reading on true crime podcasts and listened to a few episodes of some of the most popular ones, which I find to be very dry frankly. I stumbled on the plagiarism conversation that's been happening in the space and found it extremely interesting. Since I come from a background in journalism, having worked at CBS Radio and Refinery29 as an editor, writer, and producer, I take a different view of citing my sources. I always planned to link to my materials in my show notes, but it made me realize I was also analyzing information differently, with more of the criteria for verification that reporters require and that might not be in the toolbox of an amateur starting a true-crime podcast. I ended up adding the major citations to the end of each episode as well, which is a practice I think all true crime podcasters should embrace.

Thanks, Courtney!