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James E. Allen: “Prayer for Rain” (litho, 1938)
(source: Smithsonian Institute of American Art)

It’s easy to mock this simple, Manichaean scenario – to dismiss it as fundamentalist claptrap or treat it with bemused condescension. But today’s conservative evangelicals have little in common with their rural, working-class ancestors, for whom daily existence was often a life-or-death struggle between fearsome external forces – economic, political, environmental, medical – over which they had limited control. Such conflicts found natural, metaphoric expression in the dualist creeds and iconography of a blood-and-thunder religious faith with little room for nuance. A vivid example is the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real (1959) – a poignant set of songs about spiritual crisis and alcoholic desperation (e.g., “The Drunkard’s Doom,” “The Kneeling Drunkard’s Prayer”) that remains better-known for its kitschy cover art (much “loved” by hipsters) than for the anguish and yearning within its grooves.

Country-punk: Waco Brothers w/ Jon Langford, third from left (2000) (source: Jay Blakesberg, Bloodshot Records)

As modified by Acuff, “Wreck” is actually fairly nuanced. Minus Dixon’s explicit temperance plea to Jesus, “I didn’t hear nobody pray” grows flexible, able to encompass multiple faiths and views of redemption, or simply signify death so cruelly sudden that a final prayer – desired by many in their last moments, with or without the promise of eternal life – is simply impossible. Liberally approached, it might even evoke an agnostic’s or atheist’s cry (i.e., “I didn’t hear nobody answer,” either). Consequently, a modern-day country-punk band like the Waco Brothers – irreverent, left-wing, anticlerical – can play “Wreck” (in a fiery version atop a thunderous Bo Diddley-esque beat) with full conviction and zero condescension. Singer Jon Langford, Welsh-born but Chicago-based, gives his all, and while it’s odd to hear his native brogue on such a Southern song, it’s also a reminder that his working-class roots (among coal miners) and pro-labor passion are not that far removed from Dorsey Dixon’s.

Waco Brothers: Wreck on the Highway (Live) (2000)

A version of “Wreck” in title and subject only, Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 variation – which closes his end-of-the-‘70s album, The River – provides a glimmer of hope, compromised but extant, at the end of a double-LP of songs that portray an economically battered America on the cusp of the Reagan revolution. In Springsteen’s adaptation, the singer stumbles upon a nighttime crash but finds a survivor: a young man who cries out, not for God but for help, and is soon sent away in an ambulance. Later, in bed with his “baby,” the singer is haunted by his memory of the injured driver and imagines “a girlfriend or a young wife / and a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night” to inform her of his demise. The singer holds his lover tightly.

Bruce Springsteen: Wreck on the Highway (1980)

Springsteen followed The River – which despite its beleaguered tone was a full-tilt rock album – with Nebraska (1982), a genuinely despondent, all-acoustic set of songs about murder, hard times, and driving all night. Nebraska too closes with a “hopeful” song, “Reason to Believe,” but its opening image of a man poking an un-moving dog with a stick to see if it’s dead sets its tone of diminished expectations. If Springsteen’s “Wreck” seemed to say that no matter how bad things get, love will see you through (with an exhortation to never take it for granted), “Reason” implied that hope was little more than a reflex born out of desperation.

Next week: Part 2 looks at another wreck on the highway and its troubled aftermath in Bob Dylan’s (and Fairport Convention’s) “Percy’s Song”