Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialised in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. Her family's tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalised in folksongs like 'Knoxville Girl' and 'Pretty Polly' reminding them always to know their place-- or risk the wages of sin. -- adapted from jacket