Norman Blake (photo by Henry Horenstein)

This is the first of three posts on “Billy Gray.” Read the second here, and the third here.

Prelude:  But I regress…

After last week’s focus on re-thinking gender roles in both new murder ballads and contemporary versions of old ones, moving to “Billy Gray” is slightly jarring, even for me.  This relatively new song makes no challenges to traditional gender roles in murder or outlaw ballads.  It reinforces them, which is probably one reason why it works. My timing is odd, I’ll grant you, but there is some other territory I want to explore through this song. I don’t mean “territory” entirely figuratively.

True love knows no season

Norman Blake‘s “Billy Gray” was an instant classic when it came out in 1975. It’s a tragic romance, set in the American Wild West.  We’ll let Blake sing us the story before we go any further:

Listen here on Spotify. Lyrics

As I mentioned, after last week’s discussion, it feels odd to have this song end with our romantic heroine left grieving her doomed (anti-)hero.  Perhaps, after we listen to the song more, we can ask Eileen to give us a new, improved Sarah, keen-eyed and handy with a Winchester.  As the song stands, Sarah joins the ranks of Faleena in “El Paso” or Red Molly in “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” hopelessly distraught as her lover dies violently by agents of the law (or at least justice). Unlike them, she appears not to have known he was an outlaw.  He is not murdered, legally. She is left behind.  Her love redeemed Billy, but didn’t save him.

If we distinguish outlaw ballads, strictly speaking, from murder ballads, strictly speaking, “Billy Gray” is even more a pure outlaw ballad than “El Paso, which was something of both. We’re taking “Billy Gray” in under our somewhat broader definition. Billy’s crimes entirely precede the action of the song. The dynamics of sin, redemption, and justice are still there enough to give it some of that murder ballad feel.  But, taking Sarah’s perspective, a fat lot of good such justice does. Billy’s short time of redemption can be no more than insufficient and bittersweet consolation.

From another perspective, the song could hardly end any other way and be anywhere near as satisfying.

Go West…

The song’s Western setting and the role of the outlaw inspired me to discuss it this week.  For the record, the setting is essentially fictitious.  I could be wrong, but the only real place names in the song are Kansas City and New Mexico.  Grainger County is a real place name, but the only Grainger County in the United States is in northeast Tennessee; much closer to Blake’s home in north Georgia than it is to the setting for this story.  Perhaps it scanned better than Grant County (which both New Mexico and Kansas have), or Gray County (Kansas or Texas).  If there ever was a town called Gantry, it’s a ghost town now.

It doesn’t really matter.  As we’ll hear later this week, “a good story is a good story.”

It doesn’t really matter, except to the extent that the song is set in an American West of Blake’s imagination and, especially, ours.  That imagined West does matter.  It’s a particularly good geographical space and time to attach romance to the outlaw. Out here, we can juxtapose the purity of love (or the purity of the heroine) with the outlawry of the anti-hero.  The extent to which the song surpasses the adage that “death is just a really effective plot device” is the extent to which we identify with Billy or with Sarah and their redemptive love. We can do so more easily on the American frontier, regardless of the differences between the real West and the imagined one.  Put the same story in different, more civilized settings, and see how it changes your perception of the characters.

Wide open spaces

It also matters because of the real Wild West’s place in the history of American violence.  In the book I mentioned last week,  Popular Crime:  Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, author Bill James offers a four-part theory to explain the sharp growth of murder rates in American society between 1840 and 1885.  The four parts are as follows:

1) “Firearms became cheap…better built, easier to use, and more deadly;”

Malcolm Gladwell

We could also add to James’s points the theory, recently made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that “cultures of honor,” coming from European pastoral societies also played a role in the level of feuding and homicide in the American South and West.  After all, it’s fair to say that a good many an outlaw was born from grazing wars in the West.  (I don’t think the “culture of honor” theory is on its own a sufficient explanation of murder rates, but it does help us understand the continuing salience of murder ballads like “Matty Groves” or “Fair Ellender” in certain segments of the culture.)

We have a paradox of sorts. Pre- and post-Civil War culture in the U.S. contributed to an enormous spike in the overall homicide rate in the United States, driven in no small measure by expansion of European-American settlement into American frontier (into the lands of indigenous peoples).  The same American West gives us a quasi-mythical historical setting, supplying both myths of rugged individualism and personal liberty as well as romantic myths like “Billy Gray.”  The experience of the West was surely not entirely defined by this violence, but it is interesting that a time and culture so filled with violence becomes a source of nostalgia for those who never experienced it in the first place.

“Gunfight,” N.C. Wyeth, 1915

What does this have to do with the songs?  Well, as Olive Burt observed, the American West was fertile territory for the creation of murder ballads, although the soil proved rather hard for actually preserving those stories.  Blake, like Marty Robbins before him, fills that gap by giving us fictitious stories of love and death on the American frontier.  They are not, however, murder ballads in the same sense as the songs Burt describes. Both songs give us distinctively American fairy tales, that are no less mythical for being entirely un-magical.  They mythologize and romanticize a time and place that bequeathed the country a rather violent legacy.  But, they give us great stories.

The imagined West gives the artist creative space. The back and forth between lawlessness and law and order provides ample room for good stories.  The appeal of the outlaw, for audiences generally and for musicians in particular, supplements this creative space.  I discussed the ties between outlaws and artists last spring, when reviewing performances of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty.”  It’s a theme that I hope to tease out a bit more in the week ahead, including in conversation with one of the song’s interpreters.

Next up

Footnote on Randolph Roth

It was not my intent above to be (by)passing Roth in discussing the factors contributing to high murder rates in the United States.  As James focuses on crime stories more than crimes, we focus on music more than murder.  Plus, I’ve only just started reading Roth’s book, American Homicide, so my take would be incomplete.  In any event, Roth’s four main factors driving the high homicide rate in the U.S. (and not just between 1840-1885).  Murder rates fluctuate, he argues, based on the presence or absence of the following factors:

Roth writes for a more scholarly audience than James. He offers less humor to lighten the mood, but the book is also excellent (so far).  Reading James’s and Roth’s factors together, it’s not too difficult to see the areas of overlap between them.  I’m not sure I’ll find much help with regard to balladry in there, but I’ll continue with Roth’s book, and do my best to get quickly back to the music here.

1.  The belief that government is stable and that its legal and judicial institutions are unbiased and will redress wrongs and protect lives and property.
2.  A feeling of trust in government and the officials who run it, and a belief in their legitimacy.
3.  Patriotism, empathy, and fellow feeling arising from racial, religious, or political solidarity.
4.  The belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate, that one’s position in society is or can be satisfactory and that one can command the respect of others without resorting to violence.