Batshit Crazy and Weirdly Touching: Murder Ballads for Family Hour

This post is the first part of Batshit Crazy and Weirdly Touching: Notes on Culture, Violence, and Identity, a six-part series where I explore how the things we grew up watching, hearing, and laughing at quietly shape who we become.

Finding murder ballads where you'd expect church songs

Here's something I don't often admit: I quite enjoy, from time to time, watching old videos of Porter Wagoner on YouTube.

Who's Porter Wagoner? He was a rhinestone-covered country music star who had his own variety show on American television from the late 1950s into the 1980s: The Porter Wagoner Show. That's right — a whole weekly programme of songs, skits and Christian values, beamed into American living rooms as wholesome family entertainment.

It's the kind of thing that makes you think of Norman Rockwell paintings, Coca-Cola advertisements, and the kind of rugged, old-fashioned charm that sold the myth of American innocence to itself. Think square haircuts, kitchen aprons, and slow-dancing in a church hall.

But before you get too swept up in the nostalgia, I invite you to watch Porter Wagoner perform The Cold Hard Facts of Life.

It's not what you might expect.

"They screamed and cried, please put away that knife ... "

The song is a first-person narrative in which a man comes home early from a business trip, hoping to surprise his wife with champagne. Instead, he catches her cheating on him. Overcome with rage, he stabs someone (maybe both of them — the lyrics are a bit vague) and ends up in prison, unrepentant.

The storytelling is graphic. Suspense builds through each verse until the knife is drawn. And the way Porter delivers it — dead-eyed into the camera, with a slow zoom on his face — is so hauntingly flat it almost turns camp. He looks like Principal Skinner from The Simpsons channelling a war crime confession.

It's methodical. Cold. And, somehow, broadcast in primetime.

The Comments Section is a Museum

The video's comments section only adds to the strangeness. "I love this song," writes one user, finishing with a knife emoji. Another calls it "touching." One woman, posting with three heart emojis, says her entire extended family "grew up on this."

Grew up on what, exactly? Songs about domestic homicide? Delivered without irony to the sound of a pedal steel guitar?

I don't say this to pass moral judgement on individual listeners. In fact, that's part of what makes it fascinating. This was normal, even beloved, family fare in a particular time and place. That's the part I find so dissonant. Not the violence itself, but its place in the cultural centre. A "cold hard fact of life" wrapped in rhinestones and served between sponsor jingles.

And it makes me wonder: how do other cultures present violence? How do we decide what's too much? And what happens when the line moves?

Honest or Unhinged?

To be fair, I enjoy stories that deal with life's brutal truths. Violence, betrayal, injustice — these are part of the human story, and art can help us explore them. But there's a difference between honest reflection and emotional numbing. And this particular performance feels, to me, more like the latter.

There's a nihilism in the song's framing. The cold hard facts of life — that's just how it is. No questioning. No grief. No reckoning. Just a man, a knife, and a prison sentence.

Which makes me wonder what kind of conversations families had after watching this. Or if they had them at all.

Maybe that's what unsettles me most. Not the violence itself, but the silence that follows it. The way something so devastating can be packaged as entertainment, absorbed without question, then quietly passed down — as though there's nothing more to say.

Reflection Questions

1. What media did you grow up with that now feels strange or troubling when you look back?
   What values did it promote? What did it leave out?

2. How is violence typically portrayed in your culture or family context?
   Is it sensationalised, minimised, justified, condemned — or simply accepted?

3. What kinds of stories do you consider "appropriate" for children?
   Where do those boundaries come from? Are they cultural, personal, historical?

Activity: Memory vs. Message

Pick a piece of media you loved as a child — a song, TV show, film, or book. Revisit it now as an adult.

• Watch or listen to it again.

• Write down what emotions or thoughts it stirs in you today.

• Then ask yourself: what messages does this story really communicate?

• What might it have taught you, without you realising it?

This exercise isn't about guilt or revisionism. It's about curiosity. Stories shape us — sometimes quietly, sometimes radically. Taking the time to look again can help us understand where we've come from, and what we're carrying.

Next week

In the next post, Guns, Guilt, and Gospel Harmonies, I explore the emotional honesty in country music – a genre where grief, rage, and regret are not only named but sung about in detail. What happens when a culture gives voice to pain this directly? And what are the risks when that pain is wrapped in fatalism or catchy choruses?

Batshit Crazy and Weirdly Touching is a blog series about the strange, sometimes unsettling ways that popular culture, violence, and inherited stories shape our sense of self. Inspired by a single YouTube video of Porter Wagoner singing about murder on family television, the series unpacks how our childhood entertainment reflects deeper cultural values — and how becoming aware of those values can help us choose who we want to be. Read all six parts here.