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Romance, violence, and absolution

I first heard “Seven Spanish Angels” around the time we were starting this blog in 2012. I wasn’t sure we would ever want to get into it. At first, I found it canned, cheesy, and weird. Its semi-congruous, contrived symbols confused me. What is the “Altar of the Sun”? (or is it “Son”?) Why are the angels (a magnificent seven of them) Spanish? The “I can’t make it without my man” line requires you to check a few judgments at the door. The song also includes a semi-suicide. Its heroine raises her empty gun against the attackers knowing full well what the result will be. Her lover’s odds weren’t significantly better. I wanted to stay away from the suicide theme, particularly in our early days.

Cooper’s notes explain that Billy Sherrill, Friendship’s producer, decided to delete a chorus that explained the rest of it. Sherrill felt the chorus made the song too long. Cooper adds, “While the story line is thus oblique, the ambiguity somehow enhances the feel of the record, as Willie and Ray, whose voices and phrasing could not be more dissimilar, provide the true grit needed to hold the song’s romantic drama fast before a sweeping choir of background voices.”

Cooper has it right. You can hear phrasing issues in the live performance above. Both singers famously use idiosyncratic phrasing, and they faced a challenge in moving through the final chorus with Charles improvising lyrical accents around Nelson’s sometimes unpredictable pacing.

More importantly, the oblique story is key to the song’s success, paying compliments to the listener’s imagination. Just about every song worth its salt will leave room for the listener’s interpretation, regardless of length. “Seven Spanish Angels” tells its story quickly, and therefore leaves acres and acres of room. The listener’s interpretation, though, is less about what happens in those two verses than what happened before them. [Spoiler alert] It’s the final shoot-out of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid without the train capers, protracted chases, bicycle riding, and raindrops falling on our heads.

Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty” provides a helpful comparison, as Pat reminded me. Van Zandt’s song is a classic, post-modern Western, and its ambiguity develops both in the lyrics and outside them. By contrast, both the real-world and supernatural action of “Seven Spanish Angels” is told straightforwardly.

As I mentioned, synopses of the song tend to inject various inferences about the lovers or the story. I’ve read some interpretations of the song alleging that the hero shot himself. The lyrics saying that this will be “his last fight,” and telling us what happened “when the battle stopped” undercut the plausibility of that reading; but, to each their own.

The other key to the song’s success is its spiritual or supernatural landscape. Whether because of their love for each other or the circumstances that preceded this scene – or both – the angels’ intercession and the “thunder from the throne” admit them to heaven. The song is ultimately less about their doomed battle than their eternal redemption. This aspect reprises a kind of  “sanctification of the outlaw” that Cindy touched on in her post about Jesse James songs. It appears also in Norman Blake’s “Billy Gray.”

Once upon a time in the West

Conventional wisdom and some scholarly opinion says that mainstream country music wants to avoid violence. Teresa Goddu’s thesis about “the Gothic” received a recent echo in Brett Sparks’s conversation with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Sparks, of The Handsome Family, mentioned that his wife Rennie’s creepy lyrical enhancements to the song “Arlene” (Spotify) basically made the song unacceptable in Nashville, well after the wary time about which Goddu writes.

We can see in “Seven Spanish Angels” that the American West provides another acceptable context for violence, adding to infidelity and domestic violence songs. This is no surprise, though, as “Seven Spanish Angels” is an obvious successor to Marty Robbins’s cowboy songs and ballads, among others. Many reviews of the song mention “El Paso,” but “Faleena” should merit attention as well. Our two lovers in “Seven Spanish Angels” are not both equally fighters, though, at least within the song. Although less direct about ending her own life than Faleena was in Robbins’s “El Paso” sequel, our heroine here dies without killing anyone. Who commits what violence and why affects how people receive the song. I doubt “Seven Spanish Angels” would have gotten very far if the woman had picked up a loaded gun.

Noah Berlatsky recently wrote a review of the re-boot of the classic film, The Magnificent Seven. Berlatsky argues that the new version of the movie strangely pretends that many of the racial and class dynamics that would have suffused the real-life setting of the movie, don’t exist within the world of the movie. The new movie implicitly raises a lot of questions without actually asking or answering them.

While not exactly analogous, comparing The Magnificent Seven to “Seven Spanish Angels” discloses that the American Old West is both a historical landscape and an imaginative one. It works because it’s both a real setting and one that we can safely disconnect from our real lives.

People trying to understand what happens in “Seven Spanish Angels” might wonder if the lovers are Mexicans and/or outlaws. They might wonder which direction they are fleeing from Texas, and whether the riders behind them are agents of the law, the military, or some less legitimate party. In the end, it doesn’t really matter to the logic of the song. The West provides the space for a romantic absolution in death through a hopeless, violent confrontation, and God and seven angels—you know, some of the Spanish ones—redeem and sanctify the fugitive lovers. Blaze of glory. Happy ending.

What will happen with “Seven Spanish Angels” in the hands of future interpreters? Will people stay satisfied with the micro-story or want to fill in the gaps with new verses? I ran the idea by Pat, and he doubted that it would grow. He thought the song might get buried in its own cliche without the ambiguity afforded it by its brevity. “Seven Spanish Angels” may never become a classic folk song or get a dozen verses added to it. It might not join the ranks of “Pancho and Lefty” or “El Paso, ” for example. Perhaps it will still do in a pinch, though, for listeners and singers when “the riders” descend, or they find themselves in need of romance or a quick dose of musical forgiveness.

Covers

As I mentioned above, a wide array of artists have covered “Seven Spanish Angels,” mostly in the country genre. You can also get a sense of its broad international appeal from the playlist below.

Thanks for reading and listening.