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Singing at an Angle to Content

Harris sings lead vocals on only two of the album’s 16 songs. The rest of the album smells like blood and gun oil. Much of it is nearly gleeful. Last May, in a post about disaster songs, I wrote about how well Stan Rogers sang at an angle to content. This album approaches that angle as well, though in most cases it feels more like willful simplification in the service of mythology rather than art. In so many of the songs on Kennerley’s compilation, something merry or smug upstages solemnity. When Helm and Daniels sing, the work feels more mischievous, and it’s not humor in service of complexity. It’s old violence in service of contemporary entertainment.

Although James’s actual story is tangled in the history and politics of the American South, The Legend of Jesse James arises from and is part of the Western genre, and some history lies behind that feeling. John A. Lomax included the song “Jesse James” in his 1910 anthology, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. For Lomax and others, it was an American ballad, and it fit in a frontier tradition.

Most Westerns invoke good/bad binaries (wilderness/civilization, Native American/white settler, lawmen/bandit…). Kennerley both traffics in and dispenses with the binaries we associate with the Western, depicting Coleman Younger’s pride in “ridin’ and a hidin’ and a runnin’ with Jesse James” but also acknowledging the misery of making binder twine in the Stillwater Penitentiary. He allows the James-Younger gang to float back and forth (and between) a fixed good/bad binary. He gives voice to some hardship and heartbreak, and some complexity, but in several songs the tempo, key, and vocal delivery out-muscle what is sad or difficult. Jesse James remains, even in 1980, a sympathetic hero, and the complex difficulties of post-Civil War Missouri are mostly elided.

In “The Old Clay County,” Charlie Daniels gives voice to Coleman Younger, introducing the song with a spoken monologue. It’s easy to imagine John Prine introducing “Dear Abby” or Jack Elliott sharing his preamble to “Bed Bug Blues,” each warming up an audience – but it’s Younger’s tale about a bank robbery. He mentions, briefly, a man who was shot, but the song begins with a breezy greeting: “Howdy, my name’s Coleman Younger.” You can hear the grin in his voice. We are not listening in on the thoughts of a mind weighed down by complexity.

“Riding with Jesse James” is another Daniels/Coleman Younger track, and both the lyrics and the vocal delivery position the James-Younger Gang heists as good ole’ fun: excusable and exciting. Daniels sings of Jesse, “He made a stand for the common man suffering the rich man’s yoke, stood for the common folk.” He moves out of song and into speech at the end, admitting, “We might have lost the war, but we’re gonna wind up with a lot of Yankee money.” Here, Kennerley perpetuates a narrative cultivated by many, including and maybe particularly the newspaper editor John Newman Edwards.

Author T. J. Stiles claims in Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War that Edwards constructed an elaborate campaign to depict the outlaws as Confederate heroes. Edwards compared Jesse James and other gang members to Arthur and Sir Lancelot, tying them to a chivalric tradition. He wrote, in “The Chivalry of Crime,” that “A feat of stupendous nerve and fearlessness that makes one’s hair rise to think of it, with a condiment of crime to season it, becomes chivalric; poetic; superb.”

In 1969, British historian Eric Hobsbawm categorized Jesse James as an example of the noble robber (stealing from the rich and giving money to the poor). Stiles debunks this ennoblement, asserting, “Jesse James did not rob railroads. He robbed express companies, which oppressed no one.” Later, he argues that Jesse James did not stand against corporations so much as against fellow Missourians who sided with the Union. He also ties Jesse James directly to the “Southern-separatist, white-supremacist revolt of the former Confederacy.” Jesse James, he clarifies, was not a noble robber or an honorable champion of small farmers but “a highly political man who was intensely aware of his effect on Missouri politics.” Later still, he makes an even stronger claim. “In many respects,” Stiles writes, “Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist.”

This kind of history does not easily transform into something blithe or amusing, but a casual smugness emerges again in “Northfield – The Plan.” The Northfield plan involved robbing a bank in Minnesota where Adelbert Ames (former Governor of Mississippi and a proponent of racial equality) had a chunk of money. For Jesse James, the heist was a bold political statement. “Well, we took us a train,” Levon Helm shares, and the syntax and diction in that statement provide sufficient evidence of self-satisfaction. There’s more than grammar at work here, though. Helm’s voice is charismatic – charming and affecting.

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