As a banjo strikes the first notes of a Louvin Brothers–popularized standard, "Knoxville Girl," the song opens waltz-time pretty, like music playing at a country-fair dance in summer. "I met a little girl in Knoxville/A town we all know well/And every Sunday evening/Out in her home I’d dwell," sings the Handsome Family’s Brett Sparks, his sturdy baritone carefully embracing words of courtship before turning cemetery-solemn. "We went to take an evening walk about a mile from town/I picked a stick up off the ground and knocked that fair girl down/She fell down on her bended knee, for mercy she did cry. . . . Don’t kill me here, I’m unprepared to die."

It becomes grimly apparent — by the next verse, actually — that the narrator has no intention of listening to his bride-to-be’s desperate pleas. Instead, he beats her to death, eventually gets caught, and is left to languish in prison contemplating his awful crime and wasted life. The song’s grim story line — and implicit life-without-parole message — makes it the perfect choice to open The Executioner’s Last Songs (Bloodshot), a benefit CD compiled by the Pine Valley Cosmonauts and the first volume in a series of discs aimed at raising money for the Illinois Death Penalty Moratorium Project (volume two is scheduled for early next year).

The disc features murder-ballad covers of songs by the likes of Hank Williams, Johnny Paycheck, the Adverts, and Merle Haggard clustered around the twin themes of violence and vengeance. A veritable who’s who of the underground roots scene — Steve Earle, Freakwater’s Janet Bean, Neko Case, Paul Burch, among others — swap stories and songs as guest singers while the Jon Langford–led Pine Valley Cosmonauts make like a trad-country house-band version of Booker T. & the MG’s. From the manic howl and freight-train rumble of "Gary Gilmore’s Eyes," as sung by the Waco Brothers’ Dean Schlabowski, to Jenny Toomey’s languorous reading of Cole Porter’s "Miss Otis Regrets," The Executioner’s Last Songs brims with effortless vitality, gallows humor, and a sense of unforced camaraderie among its performers. In short, it’s got loads of personality (and personalities), yet it never comes across as overbearing or self-righteous — a danger whenever rock musicians approach a subject as politically charged as the death penalty.

Long-time Mekon leader Jon Langford conceived and spearheaded the project, and he says that reaching out to like-minded friends in the underground music community rather than pop superstars was the key to striking the right balance between making a point and making a mess. "This is a bunch of friends, really — and it’s a group," he emphasizes over the phone from his studio in Chicago, where he’s readying plans for a 25th-anniversary Mekons tour to support a September release and fielding submissions for a follow-up to The Executioner’s Last Songs. "I hate the sound of tribute albums where country superstars deliver sanitized, slowed-down digital ballads of Hank Williams songs. You listen to a record like that and it’s just an incoherent, unfocused, obese load of crap. But people buy ’em by the droves and somebody makes a lot of money. I wanted to make a coherent album — and I think this album stands up against anything else I’ve recorded."

Langford and the Chicago-based Bloodshot label estimate that the disc has so far raised between $40,000 and $50,000 for the Moratorium Project, which itself is meeting with success: a recent string of exonerations of innocent men sitting on death row has, until further notice, halted executions in the State of Illinois. "We’re not trying to feed Africa or save the rain forest," Langford points out. "We’re trying to civilize America."

A British expat who’s adopted Chicago as his home town, Langford first began mulling the moral ramifications of the death penalty when he moved to Illinois from the West Yorkshire city of Leeds in the early 1990s, around the time mass murderer John Wayne Gacy was executed by the state. "I didn’t really have to think about it before because I lived in Europe — I lived in the rest of the world. I was shocked when Gacy was executed and there was no debate and no protest. The Gacy incident would have been a great time for people to stand up and say no. Why do we have to be monsters just because this guy’s a monster? I’m not saying killers should be part of society. They should be locked up. and there should be a big wall, and you should pay people to ensure that they don’t get out again."

Steve Earle, who turns in a lean, harrowing reading of the traditional folk song "Tom Dooley" on The Executioner’s Last Songs, has for years worked with various anti-death-penalty organizations. An alternate version of one of several songs he’s written on the subject, "Ellis Unit One," makes an appearance on Sidetracks (E-Squared/Artemis), his recently released collection of odds and ends that gathers together some of his most stylistically diverse work and most surprising covers. Alongside a rocked-up cover of the Chambers Brothers’ psych-soul classic "Time Has Come Today" — a duet with Sheryl Crow — sits a faithfully serrated take on Nirvana’s "Breed." Most startling, though, is his genre-hopping foray into reggae territory on the Slickers’ Jamaican anthem "Johnny Too Bad." Although none of these selections comes close to surpassing the originals, Sidetracks offers a unique glimpse of Earle’s extracurricular activities.

The chilling "Ellis Unit One," a song he originally wrote for the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, stands out as the disc’s most affecting track. For sheer pathos and naked portent, it almost matches "Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song)," a meditation on capital punishment told from the perspective of a death-row inmate that Earle, who himself has spent some time in jail on drug charges, included on 2000’s Transcendental Blues (E-Squared/Artemis). This one is the death-penalty song that cuts Earle the deepest and is the most personal. " ‘Jonathan’s Song’ is the result of me witnessing an execution, so it can be a little hard on me. It’s not a lot of fun to sing."

The idea for The Executioner’s Last Songs took root when Langford performed with Earle and Tony Fitzpatrick at a concert in 1999, which is where he met Dick Cunningham, a defense attorney active in the anti-death-penalty movement who had helped free a handful of inmates on death row in Illinois. (Since 1989, 13 innocent men have been exonerated and released from death row in that state; according to Amnesty International, more than 100 persons have been exonerated nationwide after wrongful convictions during the past 26 years; and 60 Minutes recently reran its story on the alarmingly high number of death-row inmates whose convictions have been overturned in recent years.) That’s when Langford says he first became convinced that the anti-death-penalty campaign was a "winnable" fight.

Earle, who stands to attract some strong criticism when Jerusalem (E-Squared/Artemis) hits stores on September 24 with a song about the American Taliban convert titled "John Walker’s Blues," points to a moratorium now also in place in Maryland as a sign of increased skepticism surrounding capital punishment — and an increased willingness by each side to talk and work together. "What that means is that even people who still fundamentally support the death penalty are willing to admit that the system is flawed, and that is encouraging to me. Rather than yelling and insisting that we’re right, we have to trust that we’re right and trust that capital-punishment supporters are not bad people, that they believe what they believe because they’ve been lied to. Without the help of a lot of people who believe the death penalty is just and fair in certain situations, there would not be a moratorium in Illinois right now."

Still, there has been resistance. "Somebody said we’re all a ‘murderer lovers’ club in some right-wing paper," Langford allows, his voice thorny with sarcasm. "Yeah, we want to see murderers roaming the streets. I come from a country that has many murders a year and there’s, like, 100 times as many here where you have the death penalty, which is meant to get rid of it. It doesn’t work, and anyone who thinks it does is just kidding themselves and lying, basically. The main catalyst for me is having kids that I know are going to grow up in the States and I don’t want to have to explain it to them. As I see it, when somebody dies like that, the blood is on all of our hands."

Yet one wonders whether a relatively modest, independently released album like The Executioner’s Last Songs — or any one song, album, or piece of art — can make a substantial difference. Are semi-underground artists like Langford and Earle merely preaching to the choir? How do you reach people on the opposite side of such a volatile issue?

"The vast majority of the time we are preaching to the choir," Earle concedes. "But there’s been a slow change, and, you know, not all of my fans oppose the death penalty. But I know of some who have changed their minds because of some of the songs I’ve written, and that is one thing art can do. I don’t think artists have a responsibility to do anything other than create art, but if what you’re doing is art and not entertainment, I think it is inherently political. I don’t think you have to go out of your way to make political art."

Langford takes a pragmatic view. "We’ve raised some money for the people who are working thanklessly within the campaign . . . so it’s a success as far as I’m concerned. It’s just one little tool. I don’t know how to go out and change the minds of the great majority who really don’t think about much, and probably don’t like music very much, and now who obviously don’t think about voting very much. Why the hell are they going to listen to me? I’m not Bono, you know."