A Walkin’ Chunk a Mean-Mad: Pretty Boy Floyd & Robin Hood
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Through it all, despite official demonization and a sensationalist but condemning press, the “Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills” received moral and practical support from sympathetic farmers who hid, sheltered, clothed, and fed the outlaw. Whenever possible, Floyd showed his gratitude.
But many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little home
Others tell you ‘bout a stranger
That come to beg a meal
And underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill
(Guthrie)
“Floyd” debuted as a recording on Dust Bowl Ballads, Guthrie’s 1940 “concept album” masterpiece, sequenced squarely in the middle of that grim set of sepia-toned songs about the Okie catastrophe (after “Dust Can’t Kill Me” and “Dust Pneumonia Blues”). There it provides a respite from accounts of crushing poverty and respiratory illness (thousands died from exposure to the apocalyptic “black blizzards” that menaced the drought-ravaged Plains states from 1934-1940). A tale of action, and therefore hope, amid songs of ineluctable but deadening passivity, in this context “Floyd” glows like a righteous beacon in an end times fog. Its placement and relative gleam also imply that its narrative of a “good man outside the law” might hold the key (controversial but easily missed, given the song’s good-natured jauntiness) to combating the selfishness and greed of those “inside the law” – i.e., by breaking it, in a spirit of radical solidarity and sharing. As if to underline the message, Guthrie next sings “Blowin’ Down This Road (I Ain’t Going to Be Treated This Way)” – the most unequivocally defiant tune on Ballads.
Another legendary figure, this one entirely fictional, appears on Ballads in an eponymous two-part story song – Tom Joad, the migrant worker hero of the nation’s most read book of 1939, John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl chronicle, The Grapes of Wrath (“as pitiful and angry a novel ever to be written about America,” said the New York Times). Steinbeck, who shared Guthrie’s sympathies with the uprooted poor and antagonism towards the system that displaced them, had given “Pretty Boy” a brief but significant mention in a speech by the matriarch of the “crackered out by the cats” clan – Ma Joad:
I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks … He done a little bad thing an’ they hurt ’im, caught ‘im an’ hurt him so he was mad … an’ purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint, an’ he shot back, an’ then they run him like a coyote, ‘an him a-snappin’ an’ a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An’ he was mad. He wasn’t no boy or no man no more, he was jus’ a walkin’ chunk a mean-mad … Finally they run him down an’ killed ‘im.
Ironically, the same bastion of law-and-order whose agents shot Floyd dead in an Ohio cornfield – FBI director-for-life and compulsive scandalmonger J. Edgar Hoover – for years used the IRS to harass Steinbeck for his leftish politics, compelling the much audited Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author to write the US Attorney General’s office in 1942: “Do you suppose you could ask Edgar’s boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome.” Hoover had successfully used the 30s crime wave – partly caused by the sudden widespread availability of Thompson sub-machine guns at a time when agents weren’t even armed – as an impetus to build the FBI into a fighting and investigatory force to reckon with, in part by consciously exaggerating the facts of its most notorious participants. One can imagine his chagrin at the likes of Guthrie and Steinbeck exalting one of his vanquished super-villains as a proletarian hero.
It was in Oklahoma City
It was on a Christmas Day
There was a whole car load of groceries
Come with a note to say:
Well, you say that I’m an outlaw
You say that I’m a thief
Here’s a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief
(Byrds)
If “Floyd’s” sunniness downplays its dissident message on Ballads, The Byrds’ rendition on the seminal country-rock LP Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) dashes by so breezily – in a roots music-celebratory bluegrass arrangement – it’s even easier to miss the song’s essential radicalism. Part of a late 60s return-to-roots trend that included Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Band’s Music From Big Pink (both 1968), like those records Sweetheart looked to country music – the seeming antithesis of all that was revolutionary and new – for inspiration at the height of the youth-centered rock-and-roll counterculture, suggesting there was something to be learned by embracing, not rejecting, the music of the past and the culture that produced it.