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At the very least, in 1994 Cobain’s screams seemed to have helped his fans name and fill the sudden void created by his own violent end. Today, those screams continue to help listeners navigate the song’s darkness, underscoring the violent image of the decapitated head found in the driving wheel, around which the bits of dialogue all turn:

My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me —
Tell me where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun don’t ever shine.
I would shiver the whole night through.
My girl, my girl, where will you go?
I’m going where the cold wind blows.

In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun don’t ever shine.
I would shiver the whole night through.

(Repeat)

My husband, was a hard working man
Killed about a mile and a half from here.
His head was found in a driver wheel
And his body never was found.

(Repeat first stanzas again)

That the dialogue takes the form of an interrogation, and begins by assuming a lie, suggests that something sinister as well as violent has happened here. But what? The dialogue hardly explains. The overall effect is one of stumbling onto haunted ground, or a crime scene, or both. Writing in the hefty Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Alan Palmer puts it this way:

What was the girl doing in the pines? What’s the connection between her being in the pines and the death of her husband? The listener can either safely or tentatively attribute certain states of mind to the narrator (anxiety, possessiveness) and the girl (fear) and can guess at others (guilt)…Is she shivering in the pines because of the death of her husband? If so, what is the nature of this causation? Is there some element of guilt involved on the part of the woman? It seems unlikely that she was in any way responsible for his death from a train crash, so the most satisfying explanation is that her sense of guilt arises from her being unfaithful to her husband, presumably with the narrator, at the time of his death. In turn, his anxiety may arise from his awareness of the depth of her feelings of guilt and his concern that she may harm herself. There are no definitive answers to these questions, but the intensely “gappy” variant of the song that Lead Belly sings certainly prompts the listeners to ask them. (Page 147, emphasis his.)

Palmer’s own minding of the gap is a little suspect to my eye – he is rather quick to assume a damsel in moral distress. If the song were cast as Hitchcock film, for example, the listener may not be so quick to assume even an accident. (And why not cast it that way? The song has appeared in several thriller and slasher films.)

After all, there’s not necessarily a train crash in this song — who is to say that the woman didn’t push her husband onto the tracks? Perhaps in self defense, or just to get rid of him? Perhaps she’s on the lam, literally or metaphorically or both, hiding out in a forest as well as in a spiritual wilderness. If she is guilty, perhaps she is remorseful, but maybe she is defiant. Perhaps her husband was the adulterer. Perhaps she is a liar, even a murderer. Perhaps the narrator is a man of the law trying to find that out, or a man of God trying to do the same. Perhaps the interrogator is her husband, back from the dead to haunt her and get his ghostly revenge.

A driving wheel. Image source: http://railroad.lindahall.org/

This kaleidoscope shifts in versions of the song in which the woman is addressed simply as “black girl” — as in the Lead Belly version in Smithsonian Folkways box set. Perhaps in this version the girl is a slave, and so was her husband. In that case, many possibilities come to mind about what has happened to her and, worse, what is about to happen – about who the interrogator is and what he is about to do. All of them ugly.

As Weisbard writes, what “In the Pines” offers is not so much a story as “a vast continuum of different varieties of misery and suffering.” Rather than providing a definitive final word, then, Cobain’s screaming conclusion creates yet another substantial and evocative gap that one must mind. Like Neil Young’s angry guitar solos in “Powderfinger,” Cobain’s screams help listeners hear and understand a story that isn’t otherwise there.

As Weisbard also points out, Cobain credited Lead Belly as the author of “In the Pines,” having discovered a copy of the original 1944 recording in the collection of fellow Seattle musician Mark Lanegan. Before the formation of Nirvana, Lanegan and Cobain performed as a kind of Lead Belly tribute band and toyed with the idea of putting together a tribute album, recording a few demos. You can listen to their earlier, much different cover of “In the Pines,” with Lanegan singing and Cobain on guitar, here.

In fact, the author of “In the Pines” is unknown. The song is found in both black and white traditions dating back to the 19th century. Cecil Sharp collected the first written version in the Appalachians in 1917. That version was itself a fragment, consisting of only four lines, none of which reference either a train or a decapitated head:

Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows.

Crossed rails in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train

Yep, that’s it. Not much to go on.

Over time, for reasons unknown, someone added verses about the train and decapitation. They likely took them from a different song titled “The Longest Train I Ever Saw.” That song itself has two significant variants. In one the train departs with the narrator’s sweetheart aboard, a simple song of heartbreak, but in the other the train crashes, and the sweetheart is decapitated. A version of “The Longest Train” that includes lines about the accident was first recorded in 1925; commercial recordings of both “In the Pines” and “The Longest Train” by country string bands started appearing shortly after, mashing the two songs together in random ways. In some versions, the lyrics mention a man named “Joe Brown.” Historians speculate that might refer to a Georgia governor who owned several coal mines in the 1870s and used convicts to operate them, transporting them via train.

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