Pancho’s Stepchildren

“Pancho and Lefty” has been a foray into a more Western genre of murder ballad, building on Pat’s discussion of “Jack Straw,” I suppose.  The Wikipedia entry on murder ballads cites Olive Burt’s 1958 article, “The Minstrelsy of Murder,” which noted that the American West put a distinctive mark on the murder ballad tradition–one that Burt was concerned to preserve–particularly as it seemed in greater danger of fading than its European forebears.  We’ll have occasion over the coming weeks and months to go West again with our explorations, and I’ll dig into Burt’s work a little more.  

For today, I want to tie up a few (but not all) loose ends on “Pancho and Lefty,” as murder ballad, and point to a couple pieces worthy of note, but ones that for various reasons aren’t likely to give us their own week on Murder Ballad Monday.

But first, here’s another excellent live performance of “Pancho and Lefty” by Townes himself.




And, as promised, here is a link to my Spotify playlist for some of this week’s posts.

As I’ve noted before, betrayal is one of the key themes of “Pancho and Lefty.”  As we’ll see in the weeks ahead, murder ballads at times give evidence of the law of unintended consequences or the sense in which events can swirl out of control.  The first of our “tributaries” today goes in that direction.

Another theme is the propensity of murder or violence to separate the perpetrator from his or her community–there is exile, perhaps even from the human community, broadly speaking.  This plays out in a peculiar fashion, I think, in the Western murder ballad because of its frontier context.  There may be more or less community, but the separation always happens.  The second “tributary,” although only very loosely a murder ballad, is another musical meditation on that separation brought on by the call of the frontier.

An irony in “Pancho and Lefty” is that Lefty has left the deserts of Mexico and finds himself alone along the shores of the Great Lakes.  Unlike in other murder ballads, the bandit version involves the perpetrator or the guilty party (whether you think Lefty killed Pancho, betrayed him, or merely skipped town) in an exile back in the civilized world. 

Although I’ll designate these final two songs of the week as “Pancho’s stepchildren,” I can’t say that there’s any explicit indication from their songwriters that they might have been inspired by “Pancho and Lefty;” they just fire some of the same synapses for me, and are songs worthy of note (no pun intended) in their own right.

He Used to Be a Roving Cowboy

Chicago-based singer-songwriter Michael Smith recorded “The Ballad of Dan Moody” on his eponymous 1986 album.  Smith, not to be confused with the Contemporary Christian musician Michael W. Smith, is an amazing craftsman of song, and penned some pieces that became standards for the late, great Steve Goodman (e.g., “The Dutchman“).  I first heard Smith on a radio interview on my local NPR affiliate after the release of his musical memoir “Michael Margaret Pat and Kate.”  The interview was remarkable for Smith’s disciplined resistance to being labeled a “folk singer” or “folk musician”–at least that’s how I remember it.

Michael Peter Smith

His point, mainly, was that he thought of himself more as a songwriter and a maker of interesting songs than as an exemplar of a particular genre that was born of “the folk.”  “The Ballad of Dan Moody” is, I think, one such interesting song.  It’s plucked out of context in the recording linked below, which is important to note, because the arrangement makes a lot more sense within the flow of other pieces on the album, but I’ll leave that to you to explore further.  


BALLAD OF DAN MOODY “The Ballad of Dan Moody (Roving Cowboy),” by Michael Smith (on Myspace)  (Lyrics)

This song differs from “Pancho and Lefty,” in that the protagonist is neither bandit nor lawman, but comes to feel guilty for the actions of each.  He is Hamlet or Prufrock in a Western.  He’s a man of words in a world of action.  The protagonist here betrays his three outlaw friends, in an act he claims was essentially unwitting, after he fails to persuade them of the immorality of their actions.  I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you can take his word for it.

He Told Her That He Wouldn’t, But He Lied

The last song for this week’s discussion is Blue Highway‘s “Wild Bill,” written by Tim Stafford.  



“Wild Bill,” by Blue Highway (Spotify)  (Lyrics)

and on Myspace

Wild Bill “Wild Bill,” by Blue Highway

James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickock (1837-1876)

A musical bio of “Wild Bill” Hickock, Stafford’s song defies easy categorization.  It’s a ballad lyrically, at least for the most part, but not a ballad musically.  With Blue Highway’s performance, you’d peg it as a bluegrass piece, but again it’s structure and its point of view are decidedly different from bluegrass, and its lyrical content a bit distant from “Newgrass.”

And, for our purposes, although Hickock is murdered, of course, the song is only loosely speaking a murder ballad.  As we end the week with “Pancho and Lefty,” we’re left in “Wild Bill” with the theme that starts out “P&L,” and to some extent will set the stage for later explorations of the role of the American West in the murder ballad–the pull of the frontier and the urge to move away from home and comfort to seek and make one’s fortune.

With that, I’ll wrap up our week with “Pancho and Lefty,” and these other songs that take up the Western murder ballad from some of its most recent strands.  Looking forward, or backward, I can see a number of opportunities to follow these cowboys, bandits, and troubadours into the West.