prematurely grey

OK, I’ll admit, “Jesse James” is not really the kind of song that I’d have chosen for the return of Song of the Day. It’s just that I was sitting at my computer, feeling the way I’ve been feeling (i.e., crappy) and I started thinking about the music I heard today. I had to listen to Eklektikos rather rabidly, so I could hear if John A. mentioned the show on Sunday (he did!), so I heard a lot of songs about Tennessee and Kentucky, songs sung by Marilyn Monroe (she would have been 80 today!) and the incredible “Football Game” routine by Andy Griffith (he is 80 today). I’ll have to go further into Andy Griffith another time.

“Jesse James” came on early in the show. It’s on Bruce Springsteen’s new album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. His version is pretty fun, upbeat, a little bit raucous. Kind of the opposite of the previous version in my head: me and my classmates in second or third grade music class. A bunch of little, mostly super-privileged, girls in navy blue uniforms singing our hearts out about America’s outlaw hero. Except everything that we sang at that school sounded like a dirge. Basically, we were truly old school, as in borderline medieval in nearly all song cholce and arrangement. It was like we were being trained to become the reincarnations of Elizabeth I. We were in the bleak midwinter even when sumer was a’ cumin’ in.

“Jesse James” was on the agenda for our training in American folksongs. I guess this section was intended to put us in touch with the people we would someday rule. It also carried out the school’s initiation into True Liberalism . Hard as it may be to believe, this Upper East Side girls school was something of a bulwark for radicals, or radicals of a certain economic bracket. So, we learned all the lessons taught good radical schoolgirls of 1932. It was like we were in a time machine and we landed in a production of “The Cradle Will Rock.”

For me, the mixed message of “Jesse James” was always hard to handle. I knew he was a bandit and a hero. I knew he killed people and that we were supposed to be sad he’d been killed. I knew this song was confusing. It may have been fun to sing (relatively, compared to, “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal/Sixteen miles on the Erie Canal”), but it didn’t make any sense. Plus, we did sing it in our tiny little voices at the school-approved oarsmen -stroking-along-the-Thames rhythm that we used for every song (except this crazy speeded up one about fireflies that drove us all moth-to-light crazy), so it never really seemed like fun. And, of course, it’s an American folk song, so it’s derived from some Scotch-Irish tune that we were all singing back in the day in Merrie Olde Englande.

Truth is, I didn’t know it was a fun song until I heard Bruce singing it this morning. His version makes you want to sing along, and not just because you don’t know if you’re headed for a month of Scottish naval songs. (I’m not kidding here, people–actually, we liked those because they were rousing–and we’d be better able to command the troops once we knew all the words.) “Jesse James” may be about the fun of making a hero out of an outlaw, a crazy Confederate Missourian, crime-spree loving, Pinkerton-foiling brother who even Teddy Roosevelt called “the American Robin Hood.” Hey, there’s another little lesson in how to handle the English monarchy. No wonder we sang that song.