Suffer Little Children
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Suffer Little Children" is a song by the British band, the Smiths, that was included on their eponymous debut album (1984). The song is about the Moors murders that took place on Saddleworth Moor in Lancashire on the outskirts of Greater Manchester from 1963 to 1965. Many of the victims were only a few years older than Smiths frontman Morrissey, and he has said that the murders left a deep impression on him as a child growing up in Manchester—one which he has never forgotten.
[edit] Public reaction to the song and controversy
When the grandfather of one of the victims, John Kilbride, heard the song playing on a pub jukebox he became furious at what he felt was cynical profiteering from the horrific murders. He sought legal action to suppress the record, but later stopped after talking to Morrissey and realizing the sincerity of the lyrics. Morrissey also established a friendship with Ann and Alan West, the mother and stepfather of Moors victim, Lesley Ann Downey.
The song—the first ever written by Morrissey and Johnny Marr—was written with a vocalist such as Dusty Springfield in mind, before the band decided instead to record it themselves. It was originally released as a track on the band's debut album in February 1984, but did not cause a huge amount of controversy until it came out as the B-side of the single, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now", three months later. The Sun newspaper then started a campaign against the single, claiming it to be in bad taste. The campaign resulted in some shops refusing to stock the record.
The Sun's coverage also claimed that the sleeve artwork for the record showed a photograph of pools winner Viv Nicholson in a "Myra Hindley-type stance". Although the cover does indeed show a peroxide-blonde Nicholson standing in a northern backstreet in the 1960s, there is no proof that the band ever intended this to resemble Hindley.
[edit] Examination of the lyrics
"Suffer Little Children" was performed only once live, at the Smiths' first gig at the Ritz in Manchester. The original title of the song was "Over the Moors"; it is a somber, melancholy piece.
In the lyrics, Morrissey attempts a bold and ambitious feat of sympathetic imagination by assuming the different voices of actual persons—the murderers, the victims, and the survivors—thus creating a dialogic polyphony of narrative "voices" in the Bakhtinian sense. The singer even imagines himself as a murder victim in the opening lines:
- Over the moor, take me to the moor,
- Dig a shallow grave
- And I'll lay me down.
The song's lyrics are notable for their scrupulous attention to factual detail in specifically naming three of the Moors victims: Lesley Ann Downey, John Kilbride, and Edward Evans. Assuming the voices of the two killers and then the mother of a victim, Morrissey sings,
- Lesley Ann, with your pretty white beads,
- Oh John, you'll never be a man,
- And you'll never see your home again.
- Oh Manchester, so much to answer for...
- Edward, see those alluring lights?
- Tonight will be your very last night.
- A woman said : "I know my son is dead,
- I'll never rest my hands on his sacred head".
By putting the listener in the place of the victims, Morrissey evokes the profound horror of the murders—particularly, what the children went through just before their lives were cruelly snuffed out.
The lyrics also mention Myra Hindley by name and quote her statement to the police at the time of her arrest, which in hindsight was a cryptic admission of her involvement in the killings with her lover, Ian Brady:
- Hindley wakes and Hindley says,
- Hindley wakes, Hindley wakes, Hindley wakes, and says,
- "Oh, whatever he has done, I have done".
Morrissey even assumes the collective voice of the children themselves, as they cry out to be rescued from their moorland graves like dispossessed banshees, lost in a strange, bleak, inhospitable wilderness far from home:
- "Oh, find me ... find me, nothing more,
- We are on a sullen misty moor.
- We may be dead and we may be gone,
- But we will be, we will be, we will be, right by your side.
- Until the day you die,
- This is no easy ride.
- We will haunt you when you laugh,
- Yes, you could say we're a team,
- You might sleep...
- You might sleep...
- You might sleep...
- BUT YOU WILL NEVER DREAM!"
With the mournful, insistent mantra, "Oh Manchester, so much to answer for...", the lyrics shift into the third-person and address the collective feelings of guilt and recrimination that have afflicted the community in the aftermath of the murders.
[edit] Reference sources for the lyrics and final appraisal
The title of the song, "Suffer Little Children", is a phrase found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 19, verse 14, in which Jesus rebukes his disciples for turning away a group of children and says,
- "Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
The song does not appear, however, to interpret the phrase in the biblical sense, with "suffer" meaning "permit". Instead, it seems to use the phrase, either mistakenly or deliberately, as a poetical inversion, meaning: "Little children suffer".
Morrissey's main source of inspiration for the lyrics was Welsh author Emlyn Williams' artful 1968 account of the Moors killings, Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection. In the book, one of the chapter headings is "Suffer Little Children", as is the phrase "Hindley Wakes". It seems that Williams had intended "Hindley Wakes" as a pun on Hindle Wakes, the title of an acclaimed 1912 stage play about prostitution in Lancashire, written by Mancunian playwright Stanley Houghton.
At the time of the song's writing (1982) only the three youngsters mentioned in the song had been officially recognized as victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. In December 1986, the pair confessed to having killed Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett as well. On July 1, 1987, Pauline Reade's body was recovered from the soil on Saddleworth Moor; however, Bennett's body has never been found. In light of these new facts, the song's lyrics have dated somewhat.
In some respects, "Suffer Little Children" is a song in the classic tradition of the elegiac folk ballad—a commemoration of the dead drawing on actual remembered events in the life of the singer and his community.
