Latter-day Robin Hoods? The bandit in song?
Douglas Ponton*
1 Introduction
One of the earliest references to Robin Hood is this line in the Middle
English text, Piers Plowman:
I can noughte perfitly my pater-noster as the prest it syngeth,
But I can rymes of Robyn hood and Randolf erle of Chestre1.
Hutton (1976: 1) says, “heroes are not born, they are created”. Their
creation is sometimes the work of authors, but the process as frequently
begins with the circulation of word of mouth stories about exceptional
characters, who enter a canon of folk-tradition as the subject of ballads,
rhymes, tales, or poems. The first ballads about the legendary Sherwood
outlaw describe what Keen (1961: 3) terms a “full-blooded medieval
brigand”. He is a violent desperado, whose “courtly generosity to the poor
and deserving” is his chief redeeming feature. Over the course of centuries
these positive attributes were more accentuated, until, by the time Errol
Flynn made his Hollywood blockbuster in 1938, they were central to the
character. The film portrays him as the ‘people’s champion’ in good earnest,
and his catch-phrase is disseminated, perhaps for the first time, in a global
medium:
That you, the freemen of this forest, swear to despoil the rich only to
give to the poor2.
Robin Hood, then, follows the archetype of the hero who emerges in
times of oppression to avenge wrongs, defend the defenceless, and strive
for a just cause against a powerful enemy.
In this essay I am concerned with the heroes of two popular American
ballads, the outlaws Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd, both of whom have
been cast as ‘modern-day Robin Hoods’ by balladeers. The former rode
with a private group of Confederates in the Civil War, conducting a bloody
guerrilla campaign. After the end of the war he achieved notoriety for his
refusal to surrender, carrying out a series of robberies on trains and banks,
often with violence. Pretty Boy Floyd, meanwhile, was a twentieth century
bandit, a man who, during the twenties and thirties, lived by his wits and his
gun, mainly in the states of Oklahoma and Kansas. I shall suggest that the
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audience’s sympathies are engaged, and the heroes redeemed from social
judgement, by the use of a Robin Hood motif, with whose deeds they are
persuasively aligned.
Linguistic studies of songs are not numerous, though Watson (2006) and
Kuhn (1999) break ground by exploring sexual metaphors in blues songs,
and Martin and White (e.g. 2005: 31) often provide illustrations of their
theories with reference to popular music.
The challenge for the balladeer is that of making a character whose lifestyle beyond the fringes of legality is socially frowned upon, and who
commits illegal acts that range from rowdiness and violence to robbery and
even murder – seem nevertheless to possess heroic qualities of character
that might inspire love in an audience. Bob Dylan, for example, wrote a
song about the notorious New York mafia character Joey Gallo, of whose
actions society could hardly approve. The song paints a predictable picture
of a gangster’s life, the hero redeemed from condemnation by touches like:
It was true that in his later years he would not carry a gun
"I'm around too many children", he'd say, "they should never know of
one"3
By careful selection of ideational detail (Bloor and Bloor 1995: 9) – what
has been termed, in cognitive linguistics, ‘framing’ – ballad-makers such as
Dylan are able to achieve the feat.
2 Intended audience, framing and evaluation
König4 summarises Goffman’s (1974: 10) conception of frames as “basic
cognitive structures which guide the perception and representation of
reality”. In cognitive linguistics, frames, or ‘schemata’ are seen as situational
models which simplify interpretation of sense impressions and also
linguistic signals. Thus, when we hear someone say: “The man put up his
hand; the car stopped”, there is a tendency to identify the man in question
as a policeman. As Cook (1989: 74) explains, such processes occur because
communication would be impossible if every discourse “had to begin from
scratch”, with no “mutually shared knowledge taken for granted”. He
suggests that our minds “activate many schemata at once”, “move rapidly
from one to another”, and “build new schemata and ditch old ones” (ibid:
72).
How reality is represented by a song-writer will clearly have some
bearing on how it is perceived by an audience. In the case of Joey Gallo, for
example, by giving space to human touches like that cited above, Dylan
creates a more sympathetic and likeable character than would have been the
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case if he had foregrounded other, more criminal traits. Entman (1993: 52)
highlights the selective aspect of framing:
to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them
more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a
particular […] moral evaluation.
Because we do seem to have these more or less unconscious
interpretative frames, which are triggered and spring into operation on the
slightest cues, a skillful writer, of songs or any other text, need only provide
the faintest hint to activate mechanisms that may align the reader/hearer
with the author’s design (Lakoff 2003). For example, in the Ballad of Jesse
James, we find:
Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,
He robbed the Glendale train.
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain.
Here the first two lines show a man robbing and repeatedly killing, yet
the third line rescues him from opprobrium by activating what we can
conveniently label a ‘Robin Hood schema’. The song, in fact, is an anthem
to Jesse’s heroic qualities, a celebration of his life.
Judgements can be triggered by evaluations, which Thompson and
Hunston (2003: 5) gloss as follows:
evaluation is the broad cover term for the expression of a speaker or writer’s
attitude or stance towards […] the propositions that he or she is talking
about.
As Martin and White (2005: 62) point out, such evaluation may take the
form of explicit lexis, e.g. ‘robber’ for Jesse James, or be ‘invoked’ by the
use of indirect and allusive language use, as in the case of the Robin Hood
schema.
Such processes rest on shared evaluative patterns between singer and
audience. A singer can only hope to influence what s/he imagines to be an
‘ideal’ listener (Coulthard 1994: 5) who believes, as s/he does, for example,
that stealing from the rich and giving to the poor is sufficient to cover a
multitude of other sins. In the analysis that follows I suggest that evaluation
and framing are closely involved in the transformation of bandit figures
from common criminal to folk hero.
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3 The ballad of Jesse James
In contrast to Robin Hood, Jesse James’ historical existence is not in
doubt, though it can be hard to disentangle factual and legendary strands in
stories about him. While the legend is enshrined in a song recorded by
successive generations, as recently as Bruce Springsteen’s version (2006)5,
the historical accounts are of a bushwhacker turned bank-robber following
the end of the Civil War. Robinson (1967: 252-3) calls him one of “a savage
band of looters and marauders who traveled under the Confederate flag”.
On the album sleeve to the Springsteen version, critic Dave Marsh
describes the brothers as “hardly the noblemen portrayed in the lyric”, and
instead shows them terrorising farmers and engaging in mayhem across the
southern states. What popularity they may have enjoyed seems to have
come from the circumstance that their favourite victims, railroads and
banks, were also widely hated by local populations. As for the Robin Hood
myth, Way6 quotes a letter allegedly written by James himself to the Kansas
City Times:
Just let a party of men commit a bold robbery and the cry is hang them. But
(President Ulysses S.) Grant and his party can steal millions and it is all right.
They rob the poor and rich, and we rob from the rich and give to the poor.
Here is the text of this famous ballad7, with instances of evaluation
highlighted and some speculation about the interpretative frames that may
be activated:
Text
Evaluation
Frame
Jesse James was a lad he killed many a man
He robbed the Glendale train
He took from the rich and he gave to the poor
He'd a hand and a heart and a brain
Neg. explicit
Neg. explicit
Pos. implicit
Robin Hood
Chorus:
Oh Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life
Three children they were brave
But that dirty little coward that shot Mr.
Howard
He laid poor Jesse in his grave
It was on a Saturday night and the moon was
shining bright
They robbed the Glendale train
The agent on his knees he delivered up the keys
To those outlaws Frank and Jesse James
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Pos. explicit
Neg. explicit
Family Man
Dashing desperado
Neg. explicit
Latter-day Robin Hoods? The bandit in song?
Oh the people held their breath when they
heard of Jesse's death
They wondered how he'd ever come to fall
Robert Ford, it was a fact, shot Jesse in the
back
While Jesse hung a picture on the wall
Oh Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor
He'd never rob a mother or a child
He took from the rich and he gave to the poor
So they shot Jesse James on the sly
Well this song was made up by Billy Gashade
As soon as the news did arrive
He said there was no man with the law in his
hand
That could take Jesse James when alive
Neg. implicit
137
Betrayed (Jesus?)
Domestic/Family
man
Pos. explicit
Pos. implicit
Pos. implicit
Neg. explicit
Robin Hood
Family man
None
Dashing desperado
Table 1: the ballad of Jesse James
It must be admitted that the identification of frames is a problematic
matter of analytical speculation (Maher 2001: 84) rather than one of hard
science: those I have indicated are the result of subjective intuition. For
example, the repeated references, via the chorus, to the mourning wife and the
brave children suggest that a ‘family man’ frame is being drawn on, an
inference which the references to Jesse’s refusal to rob from mothers and
children, and the domestic detail of him hanging up a picture, serve to
strengthen.
The text uses evaluation and framing to play on the audience’s sympathy
in a number of ways. In terms of selectivity, it is significant that the Robin
Hood frame appears right at the beginning; straight after, in fact, the
opening statement that Jesse was a multiple killer. The inference is that this
homicidal activity took place in the context of his Robin Hood role; and,
therefore, is excusable. Instead of portraying James as the drifting outlaw
who, in fifteen years’ criminal activity must have robbed dozens if not
scores of trains, one episode is singled out and glamourised, by the
moonlight and other details. James emerges as a dashing figure, the hero of
a single dramatic breach of justice rather than as a hardened, habitual
offender. In the tale told by the song James emerges as the victim of a cruel
and cowardly betrayal, a family man shot in the back while performing an
everyday domestic deed. In the nature of the hero/villain narrative structure
the notion of betrayal plays an important role, and this circumstance, given
the nobility the ballad accords its hero, could go so far as to activate a sort
of ‘Jesus/Judas’ frame in listeners8.
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Ponton Douglas
The Ballad of Jesse James is, first and foremost, a traditional artefact, an
instance of folk-culture rather than a modern, self-consciously commercial
piece. It occupied a niche in the kind of popular culture propagated across
America, mainly in country districts, by itinerant musicians in the early
twentieth century (Palmer 1981: 40-1). Though the author includes his own
name, Billy Gashade, in the final verse, little is known of him apart from
this reference, and the song clearly owes its survival to its intrinsic qualities
rather than its author’s status.
Chilton (2005) is concerned with the transmission of ideas, drawing on
naturalist Dawkins’ notion of ‘memes’ to explore the question of why it is
that certain ideas or ‘idea-clusters’ are propagated more than others (2005:
2). It may have been the hostility aroused by the railroads and banks across
the southern states that prepared the ground for Jesse James to be recast as
a modern Robin Hood, a term reportedly used by Theodore Roosevelt
himself. Whether or not the people of the southern states felt the song
reflected the truth about James is not important; enough people who heard
the song liked it, it caught on, and James’ place in legend was secure.
4 Pretty Boy Floyd
While “The Ballad of Jesse James” was essentially an anonymous song,
carried along on the shoulders of folk tradition, “Pretty Boy Floyd” was a
composition penned and recorded by the greatest folk-singer of them all,
Woody Guthrie9. Guthrie, at a certain point in his career, was something of
an outlaw himself. His autobiography, Bound for Glory, tells the tale of his
vagabond life across the depression-hit American south, his meetings on the
tops of freight trains with drifters and hobos, his brushes with the law:
Back outside, the rain was keeping up, and in the V-shaped beam of the
spotlights from the patrol car you could see that even the rain was having
trouble. ‘Git on outta town there!’ ‘Keep travellin’!’ ‘Don’t you even look
back!’ ‘Start walkin’!’ (Guthrie 1974: 231)
Identification with the social outcast is a theme of many of Guthrie’s
songs, which frequently pit the drifters and bums of his Steinbeckian world
against the bourgeois figures of bankers, businessmen, churchmen and, of
course, lawmen, who defend the privileges of the moneyed classes against
the deprived victims of America’s capitalist system. Many of his songs are
peopled by cowboys, rangers and outlaws. His outlaw ballads include songs
dedicated to Jesse James, Belle Starr and also, perhaps his finest in the
genre, that to Pretty Boy Floyd.
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Latter-day Robin Hoods? The bandit in song?
As with “The Ballad of Jesse James, the song elaborates a romantic
vision on top of some unpromising material. Floyd was a young man who
took to crime in the 1920s and 30s in the state of Oklahoma where he grew
up, and later in Kansas City10. His history, like that of James, is that of a
professional criminal who specialised in armed robbery and was not afraid
to engage in shoot-outs with lawmen. He did, however, manage to create a
swell of popular support in the Cookson Hills area of Oklahoma,
presumably because of his generosity with the farming population, allied to
the looks that earned him his nickname. However, as could be said of Jesse
James, to cast him in the role of a modern-day Robin Hood, as Guthrie
does, might seem another case of artistic license pushed to the limits.
Text
1
2
3
4
If you'll gather round me, children
A story I will tell
'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw
Oklahoma knew him well
It was in the town of Shawnee
It was Saturday afternoon
His wife beside him in his wagon
As into town they rode
There a deputy sheriff approached him
In a manner rather rude
Vulgar words of anger
And his wife she overheard
Pretty Boy grabbed a long chain
And the deputy grabbed his gun
In the fight that followed
He laid that deputy down
Evaluation
Explicit negative
Frame
Home boy
None
Family man
Explicit negative
Explicit negative
None
Protective
husband /
(Arthurian
Knight?)
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5
6
7
8
Ponton Douglas
Then he took to the trees and timber
To live a life of shame
Every crime in Oklahoma
Was added to his name
But many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How this outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes
Others tell you 'bout a stranger
That came to beg a meal
Underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill
It was in Oklahoma City
It was on a Christmas Day
There was a whole car load of groceries
With a letter that did say:
Explicit negative
Explicit positive
Implicit positive
Robin Hood,
Lone Ranger,
Fairy Tale?
None
Santa
9
Well, you say that I'm an outlaw
You say that I'm a thief
Here's a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief
Explicit negative
Explicit negative
Implicit positive
10
Yes, as through this world I've rambled
I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen
Explicit negative
Implicit negative
Implicit negative
11
But as through your life you ramble
Yes, as through your life you roam
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home
None
Implicit positive
Table 2: Pretty Boy Floyd
Although this is a much more sophisticated production, in many ways,
than “The Ballad of Jesse James”, the twin devices of evaluation and
framing operate in an analogous fashion.
Evaluation, it will be noted, is not always of the central character in the
song. Thus, in verse 3 it is the deputy sheriff who is evaluated as “rather
rude”, and as using “vulgar” words of “anger”. This crucial episode initiates
the hero’s ‘absentation’ in Propp’s terms (1968: 25), and it is significant that
his ‘mission’ should begin with this chivalrous defence of a ‘damsel in
distress’, a representation that makes Floyd appear in the attractive light of
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‘protective husband’ as well as evoking, perhaps, a chivalrous, ‘knights of
the round table’ schema. The fact that he overcomes a fully-armed sheriff
with a makeshift weapon, succeeding, that is to say, against the odds, may be
seen in terms of Propp’s ‘difficult task’ element in his mythical system. The
power of the responses evoked by these hidden schemata, I would suggest,
can be sufficient to override other, conflicting interpretations. For example,
to grab a “long chain” at the slightest provocation might be seen as an overreaction, suggesting a hot-headed and even violent temperament.
In verse 5 there is the first appearance of the Robin Hood schema, as
Floyd heads for the “trees and timber”, the Cookson Hills his Sherwood
Forest. Like Robin, he soon becomes a notorious local criminal, blamed by
the authorities for “every crime in Oklahoma”. He too robs from the rich to
give to the poor. Whereas, in “The Ballad of Jesse James”, this typical
Robin Hood behaviour is spelt out in so many words, in Guthrie’s more
subtle version of the myth, hearers are left to make the connections, to
activate the underlying schemata for themselves. In verse 6 the negative
connotations of “this outlaw” are outweighed by the positives associated
with his actual behaviour.
Verse 7 shows him continuing his mission, but here the tale reaches
greater profundity, as Floyd not only helps the poor by simple financial aid,
as the previous verse depicted. Here he shows an artistic streak in his
generosity that aligns him with a figure dear to Americans, who took the
‘Lone Ranger’ to their hearts during the 1930s. This masked figure roamed
the plains and homesteads of a mythical wild west, doing good to, amongst
others, oppressed farmers, who would often conclude the episodes by
saying something like: “Who was that masked man anyway? We never had
time to thank him!”
Moreover, Floyd’s gift is given to those farming families who, despite
their privations, displayed the basic virtue of hospitality, sharing what little
they had with the stranger. This circumstance aligns him with still deeper
figures from European folk-tales in which the human characters are ‘tested’
by the magical fairies or elves who in the end reward them for their
worthiness (Jameson 1972: 65-6)11.
Floyd’s final act in the song is to be the invisible hand who intervenes to
save Christmas, a cornucopia of good things arriving in Oklahoma City
expressly destined for the “families on relief”, a Dickensian touch that
aligns Floyd with festivity, and even with Santa Claus himself.
The song plays on the schism, mentioned above, between an ingroup of
important and wealthy social figures – banks, railroad companies,
businessmen, the law – and an outgroup of the rejected and unworthy,
consisting of a rural population for whom life is a struggle against the odds,
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and whose representative, spokesman and, ultimately, champion, is a hunted
criminal. A picture is painted of a society where those in power are
indifferent to the fact that many farmers, though feeding the nation, are
themselves indigent, and though they do provide relief for poor city
dwellers, this does not stretch to Christmas cheer. This opposition is made
explicit by the song’s concluding two verses in which Guthrie famously
contrasts the figures of ‘outlaw’ and ‘banker’, the one who will rob you
“with a six gun”, the other with “a fountain pen”, and gives his judgement
unequivocally in favour of the former, since of the two it is the banker who
will, heartlessly, “drive a family from their home”.
5 Discussion: ingroups and outgroups
I touched, above, on work done by Paul Chilton exploring the reasons
why certain ‘idea-clusters’ are propagated more than others. His study
focuses on Nazi ideology, but one can equally apply the concept to the
notion of the transmission, via folk-culture, of songs, poems, tales, and the
like, and argue that the success of some of these in surviving down to
modern times where others are now forgotten is not for arbitrary reasons.
Successive generations find, in ballads like those examined here, meanings
that are not of simply historical interest; indeed, it is arguable that historicity
adds a lustre to tales that tackle issues of perennial relevance. Once a figure
like Robin Hood attains legendary status, it is hard to see how the sun of his
appeal might ever set, since the figures of powerful oppressor on the one
hand, and oppressed multitude, on the other, are unlikely ever to disappear
altogether. To the extent that the lesser figures of Jesse James and Pretty
Boy Floyd have succeeded in entering the select company of legendary
heroes taking up arms for the oppressed, their relevance for futurity is
assured.
A fundamental principle both of human cognitive structures and social
organisation is the notion of ingroup/outgroup (Tajfel and Turner 1986,
Oakes et al 1994: 82, Van Dijk 1984: 40, Van Dijk 1995: 144, etc.). Songs
can be powerful instruments in this sense; provoking, that is to say,
identification in the listener with one social group while at the same time
demarcating boundary lines dividing it from another. The genre of ‘protest
song’, whose foremost exponent in the 1960s was Bob Dylan, is a good
example of this. Songs like “Medgar Evers”, “The Lonesome Death of
Hattie Carroll”, and “Hollis Brown”, attempt to create an ingroup of
listeners sympathetic to the plight of underclasses such as the American
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negro or, in the last case, poor farmers. His song “Masters of War”12 is an
attack on the armaments industry:
You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled,
Fear to bring children
Into the world.
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed,
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins. (explicit negative)
Here the desired ingroup is constituted by the whole of humanity (all
men and women are potential mothers and fathers). The outgroup is
anyone involved in making weapons, and particularly the bosses of
armaments factories. The strength of the process of ‘self-categorisation’ in
the ingroup (Oakes et al 1994: 95) that occurs as people listen to the song
will depend on the extent to which they share Dylan’s ideology (see
Coulthard 1994: 5). Dylan’s use of intensified judgements (Martin and
White 2005: 140) help him to frame the arms manufacturers as cynical
criminals, bent on self-enrichment. Naturally, those involved in the business
of arms manufacture would resist this view, from those on the factory floor
simply ‘doing a job’ to the bosses themselves, who would speak about the
necessity for ‘national security’, for ‘self-defence’ and the like.
Because popular songs enjoy such a high social profile they are extremely
effective carriers for the ‘memes’ they disseminate. But, as Chilton (2005:
40) reminds us, “the cognitive structures are not in the texts, they are in
people’s heads”. People eventually align themselves around such issues in
predisposed ways, according to complex sociological and psychological
processes.
If we turn to the ballads of Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd, we might
ask what sociological and/or psychological factors have enabled them to
survive the test of time. For neither are simply museum pieces, of interest
only to the historian or musicologist. Both have an enduring life among
country musicians and their audiences, as is witnessed by the successive
generations of artists who have recorded them13.
Outlaw ballads begin, as suggested above, with a paradox. The heroes are
men and women who commit acts deserving of social condemnation, while
laws exist to protect all citizens from criminals. How then, can a brutal
criminal be turned into the stuff of legend and song, to the point where
s/he can appear in the light of an archetypal ‘hero’?
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Ponton Douglas
Part of this must be attributed to aesthetic factors; to poetical and
musical qualities that are beyond the scope of this study. In part, I have
suggested, the solution is to seek in the areas of evaluation and framing.
Both songs use selectivity, which aids their authors to frame the men as
Robin Hoods of their time, smoothing over or, better, ignoring completely,
matter that conflicts with the desired frame. James is shown making one
dashing train robbery by moonlight, then cruelly betrayed by a friend as he
performs a humdrum domestic action. The song repeatedly stresses his
mourning widow and his brave children, suggesting that the mainsprings of
Jesse’s life were family values, as if his involvement in crime were simply to
provide for his children. The reality was probably very different, but the
attractive light in which James appears makes him a more convincing carrier
for the crucial Robin Hood frame. In the case of Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody
Guthrie elaborates the legend as a master story-teller, adding to the Robin
Hood frame elements of the Lone Ranger, fairy tales, and even Dickensian
Christmas lore.
In terms of the ingroups and outgroups created by the songs, these have
a great deal in common. For Jesse James the ingroup was ‘the poor’; in his
context mainly subsistence farmers, sharecroppers and others who lived
from the land, while the outgroup consisted of the railroad companies, the
banks and the law agents. As suggested above, while locals may have
disapproved of some of James’ violent excesses, they probably secretly
enjoyed his attacks on the railroads. The railroad companies took advantage
of their monopolies to charge farmers unfairly high prices for freight, which
aroused fierce resentment, as did the policy of granting congressmen free
railroad passes (Clark Northrup 2003: 488). For Pretty Boy Floyd, the target
of the railroads disappears, to be replaced by the foregrounded figure of the
banker, who oppresses the same ingroup members – the poor, the starving
farmers, the families on relief. In both cases it is significant that the outlaw’s
criminal activity is framed as being undertaken, at least in part, if not
primarily, on behalf of these disadvantaged members of society.
The fact that these songs continue to appeal to successive generations of
singers and audiences is due to the continued operation of membershipping
mechanisms, which continue to divide listeners into ingroups and
outgroups. Though resentment at railroad companies has largely subsided,
the same cannot be said for banks. A vision of western society as essentially
divided, between ‘the poor’ on the one hand and ‘the powerful’, on the
other, seems as applicable in today’s corporate, globalised world as it did in
19th century America. Guthrie’s condemnation of heartless bankers who
throw families, unable to pay their mortgages, onto the streets, does not
describe a vanished world. Indeed, in the context of the current global
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145
financial crisis, the vast sums of public money paid out to failed or failing
banks seem evidence of a collusion between the worlds of politics and high
finance that would have provided fresh fuel for Guthrie’s satirical pen.
The diagram below summarises what has been said concerning the
possible reasons for the continuing appeal of these historical songs:
Jesse James
ROBIN HOOD
Pretty Boy Floyd
Steals from the rich and gives to the poor
OUTGROUP
INGROUP
Bankers/ Railroads
/ Lawmen
Starving farmers /
the poor /
Families on relief
Modern Listener
Figure 1: Self-Categorisation of a Modern Listener
Of fundamental importance is the Robin Hood frame or schema, which
aligns both bandits with the Sherwood outlaw. To the extent that a listener
identifies more with the oppressed poor (in today’s world of a shrinking and
increasingly insecure labour market, a probable circumstance) than the
oppressing rich, s/he will tend to self-categorise into the desired ingroup.
“Whoever fights my enemy is my friend”, was the sentiment that excused
much of Jesse James’ behaviour in his own time; and, in today’s corporate
world in which ‘everyman’ may feel himself at the mercy of faceless
capitalist bosses in league with an untrustworthy political class, the same
sentiments may animate modern listeners, who may feel that the world
could still use a Jesse James or a Pretty Boy Floyd.
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Ponton Douglas
6 Conclusion
Not every ballad in the outlaw genre has the aim of transforming the
protagonist into an archetypal hero. “The ballad of Dick Turpin”14, the
English highwayman, simply glorifies the romantic, dashing elements of his
criminal behaviour, while the anonymous American song “Stackerlee”15
portrays a violent criminal, known by everybody as a ‘bad man’, and
eventually hung.
In the two songs studied here, however, this has been the intention.
Elaborating on already existing folk legends, both the little-known, possibly
apocryphal author ‘Billy Gashade’ and the master songwriter Woody
Guthrie achieve the task in an identical manner. The material selected aligns
the protagonists with a number of heroic frames; specifically, the insistence
that both James and Floyd ‘stole from the rich to give to the poor’ aligns
them with Robin Hood. Since the social conditions that have ensured that
the Robin Hood myth continues to thrive are still present, successive
generations are primed to recognise his latest incarnations as these may
appear.
Robin Hood also happens to represent an extremely powerful archetypal
hero, whose relevance to successive generations derives from historical, not
mythical, circumstances. From the Middle Ages to the present day a social
distinction can be traced between a privileged ingroup, consisting of ‘the
rich’ – from medieval noblemen to modern-day bankers – and an
underprivileged outgroup of ‘the poor’ – the peasants in the feudal system,
‘the workers’ in Marxist ideology, ‘the man in the street’ today. Thus ‘the
people’ will always look with a kindly eye on anyone whose actions can be
interpreted as a redistribution of wealth from in to outgroup.
Woody Guthrie himself recorded a version of the song Jesse James16; in
which, however, he stuck much more closely than the Gashade song to the
factual James, portraying him as a dangerous gunslinger:
Run into Jesse James, boys, run into Jesse James,
The guns went off like thunder and the bullets fell like rain.
The guns went off like lightning and the bullets fell like hail;
Was on our way to Denver on the old Dodge City trail.
He describes the James gang as bank and train robbers, but makes no
mention whatever of their stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
Significantly, though Woody Guthrie’s songs have been repeatedly covered
by successive stars of country, folk, and rock music, when it comes to Jesse
James they have all tended to prefer the traditional version. It is as if the
modern world still needed a Robin Hood.
AnnalSS 8, 2012
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147
Notes
* Università degli Studi di Catania
1
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/PPlLan?rgn=main;view=fulltext,
last
visited
11/08/2012.
2http://www.finestquotes.com/movie_quotes/movie/The%20Adventures%20of%20Robi
n%20Hood/page/0.htm, last visited 10/08/2012.
3 “Joey”, on Desire by Bob Dylan, Columbia records 1976.
4 Frame Analysis, http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/publications/frameanalysis, last visited:
20/07/2011.
5 “We Shall Overcome”. The Seeger Sessions, Bruce Springsteen, Columbia records 2006.
6 Some details of the story can be read here:
http://www.minnpost.com/ronway/2010/09/10/21330/as_northfield_celebrates_a_close
r_look_at_jesse_james, last visited: 10/08/2012.
7 Recorded by Pete Seeger (1957): American Ballads, Folkways:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDo1sd9hZ5E, last visited: 20/07/2011.
8 This identification of an underlying Jesus/Judas frame is given some support by the
circumstance that Woody Guthrie chose to use the ballad’s tune for his own song
“Jesus Christ”, the chorus of which echoes that of the original: “One dirty little coward
called Judas Iscariot / Has laid Jesus Christ in his grave”.
9 “Pretty Boy Floyd”, on Dust Bowl Ballads, RCA, 1940.
10 Crime Library has a section devoted to Floyd:
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/floyd/1.html,
last
visited: 21/07/2011.
11 See, for example, the classic Grimm tale, “The Elves and the Shoemaker”, or W.B.
Yeats’ “The Legend of Knockgrafton”, (1888/2007) in which the hunchback Lusmore
is rewarded by fairies for his skill in music.
12 “Masters of War”, recorded on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Columbia Records 1963.
13 Especially since the folk revival in the 1960s, both have been regularly recorded, “Jesse
James” by the Pogues and Bruce Springsteen; “Pretty Boy Floyd” by, amongst others,
Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Melanie and Christy Moore. James, especially, has also been the
subject of numerous films, in many of which he is played as a Robin Hood character,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_James, last visited: 01/08/2011.
14 http://www.tunewiki.com/lyrics/the-halliard/ballad-of-dick-turpin-s3313387.aspx, last
visited: 23/07/2011.
15 http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~dexy/music/stacker.txt, last visited: 23/07/2011
16 Woody Guthrie 1944. “This land is your land”. The Asch Recordings. Smithsonian
Folkways,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pem2DbznsM,
last
visited:
23/07/2011.
AnnalSS 8, 2012
148
Ponton Douglas
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