A Walkin’ Chunk a Mean-Mad: Pretty Boy Floyd & Robin Hood
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In “Floyd’s” case, perhaps this was that principled lawlessness was neither new in this country nor “un-American.” Rather, it was part of a continuum of popular revolt against institutional tyranny that arose regularly during times of social and economic unrest – from the labor movement of the Gilded Age to the unabashed pseudo-socialism of the nation’s prewar FDR period, all the way up to the Kent State shootings and Marches on Washington.
Guthrie saves his best lines for last, and rarely was his “simple man of the people” persona more effective at winning hearts and minds with a wink:
Now as through this world I ramble
I see lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six gun
And some with a fountain pen
But as through your life you travel
As through your life you roam
You won’t never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
(Guthrie)
Legacy
Like the famed marauder of the English forests, he took money from those who had it – the banks – and divided the proceeds of his raids with the poor. The penniless tenant farmers kept their mouths shut; they had no scruples about taking contraband wrested from bankers.
— Oklahoma News (1934)
Guthrie’s take on Floyd was neither new nor the last iteration of its type. Heroic outlaw narratives remain a staple of folklore and pop culture, and tales of Robin Hood-like figures are at least as old as their namesake – an obscure sylvan bandit who first captured the public imagination in medieval Britain. Child records nearly forty ballads about his exploits, as old as the 15th century, and the earliest say nothing about his origin or motivations. His portrayal as a peasant revolt leader during the absentee reign of Richard Coeur de Lion dates from the 16th century, and from that point on he evolves into the familiar image of a roguish champion of the righteous poor against the rapacious rich – family-friendly and suitable for Disney movies.
This cheery assimilation is striking, because even stripped of violence and safely ensconced in a fairy tale past, such narratives violate deeply entrenched social norms. By celebrating criminals as virtuous they presume that redress of grievances is no longer (or never was) possible and posit lawlessness as the remedy to a corrupt or broken system. In such a “world turned upside down” hierarchies collapse and dogs may turn on their masters.
A vivid example (in film, not music) of this anarchic spirit exploding in the pop world was Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – an edgy essay in outlaw heroics, controversial but wildly popular, that played a crucial role in updating the theme for the 60s generation. Gangsters had been glamorized before in American movies, but never with the erotic charge and moral ambivalence Penn gave his felonious lovers – on the run in a landscape of migrant families and foreclosed farms. Bearing little resemblance to their real-life counterparts (a homely and, by biographical consensus, disagreeable pair), Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty make armed robbery seem both thrilling and justifiable. A key scene features an itinerant farmer borrowing Clyde’s sidearm – with his permission and encouragement – to shoot holes through a sign declaring that the bank has repossessed his farm.
Pop musicians have also glorified gangsters – in manners both crass (there’s an ’80s hair band called Pretty Boy Floyd) and thoughtful. In the latter case, they often claim symbolic kinship with criminals perceived as living honest lives in a crooked society – echoing organized crime’s perennial complaint that the only real difference between the underworld and its above-ground counterpart is that the Mob is honest about what they do while the government and big business are shameless liars. In some subcultures – Jamaican reggae, for instance, with its long line of songs romanticizing gangsters (e.g., Prince Buster’s “Al Capone”) and its street urchin class of “rude boys” – tough social realities give this stance more bite. In the west, the trope perhaps peaked with ’70s punk and ’80s hip-hop.
