This is our second post on Nelson’s classic murder ballad concept album Red Headed Stranger. Read the first one here.

Now the preaching is over and the lesson’s begun

As I hope was clear from the previous post, Willie Nelson’s creative enhancements to “The Tale of the Red Headed Stranger” by Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman introduced religious themes to the story. Before Nelson, The Stranger of the song was just that: a stranger, with very little in the way of religious symbol or reference. It is Nelson’s opening “Time of the Preacher” that tells us that the landscape ridden by the brooding, murderous man on the raging black stallion is more than just a Western one, and that the consequences of his ride across the plains might be more than merely temporal.

Listen to the full album on Spotify or YouTube.

The overall effect of Nelson’s album-length Red Headed Stranger is to take the listener through a landscape of sin, remorse, penitence, and redemption. You can just feel it by the end. But, yes, casting our morally ambiguous hero as an explicitly religious figure is the first step. Clint Eastwood would do something similar ten years later in the movie Pale Rider, one of a number of cinematic examples of a violent Jesus figure in movies, bringing salvation with both barrels.

Not long after Nelson released the album in 1975, Chet Flippo published a review in Texas Monthly entitled “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Willie.” Flippo not only waxes enthusiastic about Nelson’s enormous success in pulling together an album of remarkable cohesiveness and spiritual power, he begins to lay bare the individual elements of sin and redemption that perceptive listeners encountered in the experience of listening to the album. The album echoes a familiar biblical story, but with a few modulations made possible by its new setting. Flippo writes,

Chet Flippo, Willie Nelson, and Jimmy Carter

“If you’re of the opinion that Nelson’s morality play parallels the Book of Genesis, the retelling of it in frontier terms yields a surprise. Instead of reconciling himself to being cast out, the Stranger burns with an inner fire and could not possibly refrain from tracking down and shooting the woman and the viper who ended his happiness.”

However effective Nelson is at infusing this Western tale with a story arc of sin and redemption, he is not heavy-handed about it. In “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” the word “Lord” appears on the surface primarily as a commonplace exclamation, which it may be, but it could also be interpreted by some as the Preacher’s reckoning with God in a kind of theodicy of betrayal inspired by his wife’s infidelity.

Later, after killing his wife and her lover, and after his grief over this in “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” and just after killing the tempting, yellow-haired would-be horse thief, The Preacher/Stranger hits a bottom of remorse and repentance. Nelson could have been overt here, but he holds back in a way. His performance of “Just As I Am” is an instrumental, rather than a sung version of the hymn (lyrics).

Compare the RHS version to one Nelson released later on the Gospel album Farther Long.

Charlotte Elliott lyricist “Just As I Am”

Nelson crafts an elaborate, sometimes subtle pattern of symbol and cultural reference in Red Headed Stranger. In this performance of “Just As I Am,” he is sending a kind of coded message to listeners who would be familiar with the hymn tune and understand what’s going on, without simultaneously turning his Country album into an explicitly Gospel/Christian one or, perhaps, “defiling” the sacred music by association with a gritty, Western murder ballad. He leaves it open for multiple interpretations–accessible both to the Saturday night and Sunday morning crowds–or, perhaps, among the “deceivers” and “believers,” and solidly inside the “old in-betweeners.”

T. Walter Herbert, in an essay we’ll read about below, tells the story of how Nelson taught Sunday School, and well, until his church’s pastor insisted he decide between playing in honky-tonks and teaching Sunday School. Nelson made his choice, but knew he had been seeing the same people in both the bars and the church.

In the remainder of the album, we rejoice with The Stranger, as he again finds love in the arms of a woman, and this new couple dance with their smiles on their faces. More deeply, The Stranger regains his soul, and in Bill Callery’s “Hands on the Wheel,” he’s again found wholeness and direction in the eyes of another.

Christ Our Pilot, by Warner Sallman

An’ in the shade of an oak down by the river,
Sit an old man an’ a boy,
Settin’ sail, spinnin’ tales an’ fishin’ for whales,
With a lady they both enjoy.
Well, it’s the same damn tune, it’s the man in the moon.
It’s the way that I feel about you.
An’ with no place to hide, I looked in your eyes,
An’ I found myself in you.

An’ I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars.
An’ I’ve nearly gone up in smoke.
Now my hand’s on the wheel, I’ve something that’s real,
An’ I feel like I’m goin’ home.

T. Walter Herbert

In an essay entitled “The Voice of Woe: Willie Nelson and Evangelical Spirituality,” T. Walter Herbert discusses Red Headed Stranger within the context of a broader dynamic of violence, gender, and Christian religion. Although he doesn’t cite this particular song, Herbert shows how the kind of ambiguity between Jesus and a romantic partner some might find in “Hands on the Wheel” should be no real surprise. It is quite common within strains of Country music drawing from symbols of evangelical Christianity.

Taking his bearings from an explicitly religious song like “In the Garden,” also performed by Nelson, Herbert shows that there is a long tradition of songs characterizing relationships to Jesus in ways that might be considered romantic or homoerotic when taken out of context–despite the tendency of the religious traditions in question to vilify homosexuality. (He also discusses homosexuality as a relatively recent (20th century) construction of gender identity, which arose after many of these hymns were originally written.)

And He walks with me, and He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known

Herbert argues that evangelical Christianity constructs rather rigidly heterosexual notions of masculinity, which contributes to homophobia/heterosexism, sexism and violence against women. Red Headed Stranger, though, plays a significant role for Herbert in Nelson’s artistic path through these difficult and pervasive themes. His criticisms are helpful, I think, although they sometimes seem rather starkly put or exaggerated relative to the imagined American West in which the album operates. Herbert’s vocabulary is certainly different from Nelson’s.

Herbert’s retelling of the Red Headed Stranger story glosses over some important nuances. The story
begins, he writes, “When a man’s redemptive ‘little darlin’ reveals that she has a mind of her own and needs of her own, by leaving him for another man, a cycle of misogynist violence begins.” He alleges that the betrayal incites a “murderous quest” for The Stranger, a quest to kill his wife and her lover. He goes on to describe the shooting of the “yellow-haired lady” in the original Stutz and Lindeman song as instance of a kind of sexist virgin/whore dichotomy. The yellow-haired lady represents, in Herbert’s words, the “obverse of the submissive purity that his wife had violated–and he murders this woman when she dares to touch a horse that had belonged to the slain wife. The redemptive purity of the ‘little darlin” is transferred, that is, to the horse, which the ‘yellow-hared lady’ threatens to contaminate.”

Now these characterizations, as you will note, are both accurate and inaccurate. It is surely wrong for The Preacher to have killed either woman. This is understood and acknowledged within the universe of the songs. It is sin. But, The Preacher did not kill his wife because she was exercising her autonomy per se. The context of  marital betrayal and a prior presumption of fidelity is at least artistically/emotionally relevant. I’m hoping that we can distinguish here the emotional “logic” and the moral logic of this moment–not separate them, but distinguish them. (In other words, I’m not trying to excuse the violence.) Herbert’s right, in a sense, but in a way that is slightly at odds with the imaginative universe created by the song. We might hold that it’s still helpful to distinguish relationship violence in the context of marital betrayal on the one hand from sexism/misogyny on the other, even if there is a strong association between them in real life.

Describing The Stranger/Preacher as being on a “murderous quest” races over the moments of moral anguish and the demands of forgiveness that Nelson gives their due in the album. “He tried to forgive her.”

Furthermore, Herbert ignores that Lindeman’s song gives us reason to believe that the “yellow-haired lady” did in fact want to steal the horse. There’s some playful ambiguity in the moment, but in the context of her prior casting of “greedy eyes on the bay” we are given to understand that her desire for the horse is real. But, I can’t argue with Herbert that a threat of “contamination” of the horse as memento of his “little lost darlin'” is the operative motivation behind the shooting in the song.

Morgan Fairchild in Red Headed Stranger, the movie (1986)

Would it have made a difference to Lindeman’s song if the attempted horse thief had been a man? Probably, if only because it would have been more difficult to develop a context for a quickly developed relationship between the Stranger and the would-be horse thief. Would that difference have extended out to the broader album? It’s difficult to imagine otherwise.

In the end, I’m mostly persuaded by Herbert’s argument. Perhaps Nelson’s album gets yanked out of the classic simplicity in which we might otherwise hold it, but Herbert’s argument represents a challenging set of questions about the implications of the themes of the songs and why they work.

“The misogynist violence of the stranger enforces the moral structure of genders that is required by the self-reliant individual manhood that he embodies, and women pay its price in blood. Killing ‘bad’ women and sex with ‘good’ women become paired means of saving a man’s soul, cognate forms of the solace that is necessary if a man is to bear his woe, necessarily converging when the man comes into relationship with actual women. This composite image of man’s sin and man’s salvation recapitulates the feminization of Christ in evangelical religion, who is at once the source of tender mercy and marked for death. The sacrifice of women in Red Headed Stranger invokes this version of the sacrifice of Christ, the figure who saves the world by submitting to cruelty and forgives his tormenters as they crucify him.”

Herbert goes on to show how this same logic of sacrificing women also applies to violence against homosexual men, and elaborates the threat that homosexual men represent to the notions of masculinity constructed in evangelical Christianity.

The important thing to remember, however, is that the interaction of these themes within art is distinct from how we might treat them morally or politically as actual cultural forces. In other words, the darker, perhaps more ethically objectionable themes get presented within the artwork in order to provoke a response–emotional, thoughtful, or otherwise–but don’t necessarily represent advocacy for what happens in the story. In many respects, this should be no real surprise to us. Which is worse, the sexism or the murder? We’re already dabbling in the redeeming features of songs about ethically dubious behavior, to say the least.

We’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink over the past two years on the question of whether and how murder ballads with a disproportionately female body count reinforce or undercut broader forces of misogyny and sexism. The answer, I think, is still far from easy to identify, and there’s such enormous variability within the genre that perhaps a blanket statement is not possible. You have to take each song on its own terms, however strong the aggregate trend appears.

Herbert believes that Nelson ultimately achieves a way to undermine an adherence to strict notions of gender identity in his broader work, because he moves into a somewhat countercultural world of country hippies and seems to lift up these outwardly “homoerotic” Jesus songs with a self-conscious or ironic aspect. Whether or not that’s true, I think still think the power of Red Headed Stranger is deeper than any pat characterization of the way it does or does not reinforce traditional and problematic gender dynamics. In other words, we should resist the tendency to indict Nelson with reinforcing sexism/misogyny here, and recognize that he’s succeeded magnificently in giving us a compelling piece of art that draws us in to reflect on powerful themes of human existence, but hasn’t told us what to do with them.

Next up

This piece was far longer, far wordier, and far more difficult to write than I wanted it to be. It’s the best I can do, at the moment, with Nelson’s album and at least one critical interpretation of it. The next post will, I hope, be shorter. Thanks for reading.

As one final bonus, I’ll leave you with a live performance of Willie singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” on Bert Sugarman’s Midnight Special, with a supportive, if somewhat ironic in the context of their respective trajectories of musical stardom, introductory words from The Captain and Tennille.