Uncredited cover image of Russell Freedman’s “The Life and Death of Crazy Horse“

The title for today’s post comes from a line in Eric Taylor’s “Deadwood,” the third song we’ll explore.

New songs about old stories

I have been helped before by poet Meena Alexander‘s notion that poetry reconciles us to the world. It does not make us accept the world, but allows us to function when we encounter things we can’t explain, can’t fix, or simply can’t take in. I would include songs, and of course murder ballads, in this category. They allow some psychic advance when our rational powers fail. With murder ballads, we see this in how they “function” to resolve personal tragedy, at least emotionally. Songs can also do this for broader and more complicated tragedies. The songs in today’s post will provide glimpses of the value of telling hard stories from our history.

Today, we’ll explore three songs from the late 20th century, by artists wrestling with the “Indian wars” of the 19th century American West. Each takes a slightly different approach to one of the country’s formative injustices: the decimation of indigenous peoples through duplicity, unfettered expansion, resource acquisition, forced assimilation, forced relocation, and violence. The songs reckon poetically with deeds we can’t defend and can’t reverse, which were monumental and devastating in scope. Implicitly, the songs also invite us to consider the thorny, systemic injustices that followed these events and persist. Writers make up new songs about old stories, and something draws us to listen, but we’ll keep in mind that they tell us more about now than they do about then.

These songs are murder ballads in our loosely defined sense because they each involve reckoning with tragedy and violence. As with many a murder ballad, the question at the poetic level in all these songs is “What have I done?”. The “I” may be embodied in a remote, historical figure, but the question of personal responsibility may be more salient here for you than with more traditional murder ballads.

My three picks for today are not intended to be encyclopedic; far from it. Indigenous songwriters could provide us with more. Johnny Cash produced an album on these themes. We’ll probably get to other songs of this type later, and you may have good ones to add to the list. I picked these songs mostly for autobiographical reasons and because they are, loosely understood. murder ballads. I picked the third because it contains hidden treasure.

None of the songs we’ll consider today is from an artist who claims indigenous status, at least as far as I know. Furthermore, the latter two tell a “white man’s” story, not a native story. Who is telling what story to whom often makes a big difference in how we receive the song. All three provoke us to engage a difficult legacy. They are not, however, “protest songs” that make a particular call to action. Given that they are not, whether these song merely make us more comfortable with the tragedy or raise awareness to the point of enabling some positive effect or another is a partial test of Meena Alexander’s notion about poetry reconciling us to the world.

“Heart of the Appaloosa”

Chief Joseph (1840-1904)

As a kid, I devoured school library biographies of figures from the American West—pioneers like
Kit Carson and Jim Bowie, and indigenous figures like the Apache chief, Cochise. Later, I saw movies like “A Man Called Horse” and “I Will Fight No More Forever” on TV. I watched plenty of Westerns back then, but these two woke me up to this history in new ways. The latter movie tells the story of the relocation of the Nez Perce tribe and their leader Chief Joseph. Its title is taken from his words of surrender, preceding his people’s forced relocation to the Indian Territory.

Not many years later, my dad found “Heart of the Appaloosa” and shared it with me. He had dubbed it off the radio onto a cassette. Effectively pre-Internet, it was years before I knew who sang it. I eventually found it by chance, while visiting my friend and now fellow blogger, Pat, as a mutual friend had given him Fred Small’s 1983 album, Heart of the Appaloosa, on CD.

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