Brokeneck Girls, the Murder Ballad Musical, began in 2019 when songwriters Eve Blackwater and Jeannie Skelly attended an open mic and noticed an alarming trend of songs featuring violence against women.   The tradition of Murder Ballads, a genre of music frequently based on real events, began hundreds of years ago and were the original version of the true crime podcasts that are so popular today.  Jeannie and Eve, along with fellow songwriter Kendra MacDevitt, formed the folk-nouveau band Brokeneck Girls, providing an alternative take on these songs.  The group found a macabre humor in the lack of outage surrounding the popularity of an artform glamorizing domestic violence, particularly the song Knoxville Girl, which cheerfully depicts the torture and killing of Ann Nichols in 1683, and currently boasts over 100 modern covers on Spotify alone.  They made it their missions to highlight the hypocrisy while indulging in the goosebumps and guilty pleasure of the genre.  After a few months of yelling historical facts into drunken crowds at shows, and a brief attempt at performing musical skits alongside their songs, Eve took it upon herself to write a play about the characters in their songs.  Friends in the art community spread the word, FRIGID NYC offered a space to workshop the production and the show sold out its first run in October of 2023.