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Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. His parents were cotton farmers and music lovers. Was there a better voice for the role Jesse James? I can’t imagine one. Helm was one legend singing the part of another. He was an ideal choice for Kennerley’s album.

Charlie Daniels returns for “Northfield – The Disaster,” a song that sounds very much like Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” Guthrie released that song in 1969, and surely it influenced Kennerley and Daniels. “Northfield – The Disaster” is a long, spoken monologue backed by music, and it feels hyperbolic, gaining momentum as the inventory of what went wrong intensifies (“They shot us all to hell. Bill Chadwell was laying dead and Clell Miller had been peppered with buckshot and bells were ringing and the horses were rearing up and women were screaming…”). The song has an extravagant list-like quality, which makes it immensely entertaining but less than solemn. It’s partly the vocal presentation that makes this feel exaggerated, though of course that Northfield scene was likely filled with buckshot and bells and horses and screaming. Even without lyrics, the music contributes its own kind of hyperbole, tipping the song away from tragedy toward comedy.

The White Outlaw

Naturally, all of this swashbuckling adventure is most engaging. It’s also troubling. Jesse James supported the struggle against black freedom. He singled out Adelbert Ames, and made Ames the intended target of the Northfield robbery, because Ames was a leading proponent of racial equality. He murdered African Americans. His father opposed abolition and, as Stiles points out in his book, his mother “kept two black children in virtual slavery after the war.” Jesse James grew up in this environment, and grew into an intolerant man.

Stiles also joins James’s intolerance with something larger: “His strange, tangential part in the struggle over race and freedom also illuminates the rise of violence in American life.” Jesse James – American outlaw, old-time bandit, man with the bandana – is more relevant today than some might realize. Stiles connects some important dots, noting that Jesse James’s career “emerged from the conjunction of two grim forces: a new, more lethal, more affordable firearms technology, and a complete disruption of political and social codes of conduct.” He extends this thinking, explaining, “citizens began to carry firearms…because the war had destroyed the social conventions and political institutions that had contained private disputes.”

Jesse James was part of this culture, and part of the terrible violence that continued after the Civil War. Our country’s history of racial violence, which remains or is once again in the center of media attention, is a protracted one. The problems of the Civil War — new ways of killing, new attention to and obsession with race and politics – didn’t end when the war ended. We’re still entrenched in those complications.

Despite the clear continuum of violence that Stiles identifies – a continuum on which he places Jesse James – many see James as one kind of American hero. Where does this happen? Maybe somewhere along the way in childhood when we’re stretched out on a living room floor flipping through record albums. Maybe somewhere after that when we experience something like Kennerley’s album. Maybe somewhere in a movie theater. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of time and distance. It’s true that, to some extent, we did, over time, turn history into entertainment. But Jesse James dodged some kind of rebuke long ago because he was white, and because people turned his violence into stories, shaping murder into daring, heroic exploit.

At the heart of this matter are questions about how we select and define our heroes, and questions about our moral culpability. Is it problematic to find pleasure in this album? Does musical backing on a narrative structure give us permission to absorb and enjoy an album on its own terms? Do we have to ignore the reality underlying the story? Should musicians bear a responsibility for truth?

Aristotle thought art was something people could absorb to experience pain, and thought that pain could be both pleasurable and purgative. I don’t think Kennerley’s album was designed to elicit pain, or fashioned to cleanse in any particular or meaningful way. It’s not art as catharsis. From an artistic standpoint, Kennerley created something that feels mostly redundant. He repeated a popular story, but he gave it a new form: soundtrack for a movie never made. The Legend of Jesse James is not a protest album. Kennerley does not right old wrongs, nor does he try to hitch entertainment to instruction, and yet we’re not complicit in Jesse James’s violence simply we because we listen to the album. If we tie a listening experience to complicity, we’d have to turn off the radio every day, stop going to movies, and remove ourselves from modern culture. The fact is, the enormity of history makes our listening experience nearly inconsequential.

Dedication to John A. Lomax’s ‘Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads’

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