Graveyard Guru 9/1/2011

The Death Wail
by Stephanie Lincecum

The death wail is a custom attributed to several different cultures that I have been interested in learning more about. Though I did not find a singular “guru” to help me on this quest for knowledge, I hope you’ll allow me to share with you my findings in this column format.

Wikipedia describes the death wail as “a keening, mourning lament, generally performed in ritual fashion soon after the death of a member of a family or tribe.” Examples of this have been found in numerous societies and date back many centuries.

Ernest Giles, an explorer to Australia in the 1870s and 1880s, has this early account: “At the first dawn of light…a direful mourning chant arose. It was wafted on the hot morning air across the valley, echoed again by the rocks and hills above us, and was the most dreadful sound I think I ever heard; it was no doubt a death-wail….”
A more modern account comes from Roy Barker, a descendant of the Murawari tribe of Australia. He was born in an old Aboriginal mission in the late 1920s. “You hear the crying and the death wail at night. It’s a real eerie, frightening sound to hear. Sad sound…to hear them all crying. And then after the funeral, everything would go back to normal.”

Keening is a term describing a “vocal lament associated with mourning” that was at one time traditional in Scotland and Ireland. It was generally carried out by women and included the listing of the genealogy of the deceased, praise for the deceased, and how the death affected the ones left behind. This might also be accompanied by rocking, kneeling, or clapping.

Also tied to Scottish and Irish history and mythology is the Banshee. This is a female spirit seen as an omen of death. The story began as a fairy woman keening at the death of important persons.

Though not always seen, the mourning call of the Banshee is heard, usually at night when someone is about to die. There are a few different accounts of the sound -- a “low, pleasant singing;” “the sound of two boards being struck together;” and “a thin, screeching sound somewhere between the wail of a woman and the moan of an owl.”

Accounts of the death wail can also be found in American folklore. An excerpt from the 1891 A History of Mississippi by R. Lowry and W. H. McCardle:
“The history of Jackson county would not be complete without reference to the mysterious music heard in summer nights, arising from the waters of the Pascagoula river, as they flow into the broad bosom of the Mississippi Sound… The tradition in regard to this mysterious music is well known to the dwellers on our seashore, and has in it something of the high-heroic scorn of death….”

The Pascagoula Indians were sorely beset by hostile tribes. They had been defeated on many well-contested fields; their young braves had fallen in battle; their towns were destroyed and their fields wasted. None were left but infirm old men, with the helpless women and children. The exulting shouts of their victorious foes were already ringing in their ears, when, as moved by one impulse, the remnant of the tribe determined to welcome death beneath the whelming waves rather than live to be the slaves of their dested foes… In a few brief moments a procession was formed for the river, where the old men, the women and the children, the last of the tribe of the Pascagoulas, clasped hands, marched into the shining waters chanting their death song, until bubbles marked the spot where the last of the Pascagoulas ceased to live.

Ever since the Pascagoulas sang their death song on that memorable occasion, soft, sweet sounds may be heard rising in sad cadence during the summer nights from the placid waters of the Pascagoula river, and people of imaginative minds have come to regard these sad, sweet sounds as the echo of the death-wail of women and children who, two centuries ago, perished beneath the waves. The whole story may be a fiction, but many dwellers in the vicinity of the Pascagoula do not so regard it.”

While the brief overview above describes historical accounts of the death wail, the custom is still practiced today. In a video posted to YouTube in January of this year, you can hear the sounds of a death wail of the Yaminawa tribe in Peru.

You can also listen to an archival sound recording of a death wail recorded in Australia in 1898 at the British Library online.

Until next time!