Murder, mystery and heroics - my all-time favourite story songs

Ever since I was five, I’ve loved songs that tell a proper story – real beginning, middle and end stuff, featuring heroes or anti-heroes and people doing things other than falling in or out of love (usually committing acts of murder or heroism). Leaving aside traditional folk songs, here are a few of my favourites:

Gene Pitney’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (see above)  was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for John Ford’s superb 1962 Western of the same title.  But Ford didn’t use it. Nevertheless, this wonderfully dramatic 2’58” single was a big hit at the time. I practically wore the grooves out on my copy. The song tells the same story as the film, but obviously doesn’t reveal the movie’s big secret. To all appearances, it is James Stewart’s idealistic, cack-handed, greenhorn lawyer who shoots the brutal hoodlum, Lee Marvin’s splendidly vicious Liberty Vallance – but in reality the slayer (who was, the song tells us, “the bravest of them all”) was the tough cattleman, John Wayne (natch!). 

“Big Bad John”, by Jimmy Dean, released in 1961, is my second all-time favourite story song (I’m saving the best till last). It was a US No. 1 and reached No. 2 in the UK.

I must have played this record 500 hundred times after buying it (no doubt driving my family mad – this was before headphones). The lyrics, spoken by disc jockey, Dean, are wonderfully stirring:

                    Every morning at the mine you could see him arrive    

                    He stood six foot six, and weighed two forty five

                    Kind of broad in the shoulder and narrow at the hip    

                    And everybody knew you didn’t give no lip                 

                    To Big John

We’re told that John is a man of few words and a violent past – “he got into a fight over a Cajun Queen”, with the result that “a crashing blow from a huge right hand/Sent a Louisiana fellow to the Promised Land”.

One day, the mine collapses, and only John is strong enough to push up the timbers – “With all of his strength he gave a mighty shove/And a miner yelled out ‘There’s a light up above!’” – which allows his co-workers to escape. John perishes.

                    Now, they never reopened that worthless pit,

                    They just placed a marble stand in front of it.

                    These few words are written on that stand:

                    “At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man -            

                    Big John.”

Still makes the old bottom lip quiver.

“Life To Go”, Stonewall Jackson’s 1959 Country hit, is about as grim as it gets.

I’m not normally that sympathetic towards long-term prisoners who whine about their lot, but this is so affectingly mournful, I’ll make an exception. As the singer tells us, it all goes wrong after he meets an old friend in town, who “thought the world of me”:

                    Well, he bought me drinks, and he took me to 

                    Every honky tonk in town

                    Then words were said, and now he’s dead –

                    I just had to bring him down.

The narrator knows he doesn’t deserve his freedom, and that’s what makes it so poignant:

                    No, I can’t be free to go and see the ones that I love so

                    I’ve been in here eighteen years

                    I’ve still got life to go

“Hot Rod Race”, by Arkie Shipley & The Mountain Dew Boys, is much more cheerful. This 1950 slice of extremely primitive Hillbilly Boogie concerns a race between a Ford and a Mercury, which ends abruptly when both cars are passed by “a kid in a hopped-up Model-A”.

The song rather explains why the number of annual car-related deaths in the States is the same today as it was then, despite an exponential increase in the number of cars on the road :back then, safety features dimply didn’t exist – you crashed, you died. (You’ll have to forgive one line, which sounds very racist to our ears today – but the people you’re listening to are genuine hillbillies, and probably didn’t have the benefit of a liberal education.)

This record started a whole subgenre of car racing songs, including the 1955 “answer” song, the brilliant “Hot Rod Lincoln”  by Charlie Ryan in which the singer admits “I was that kid in the Model A”. He is arrested after racing a Cadillac (“the lines in the road just looked like dots”), and phones his Daddy to go bail: “Son, you’re gonna to drive me to drinkin’/If you don’t stop drivin’ that Hot Rod Lincoln”.

“Brother Louie”, by Hot Chocolate, is a1973 song about an interracial love affair, written and performed by the highly successful British mixed-race band, fronted by notable baldy Errol Brown. Godfather of the UK Blues scene, Alexis Korner, speaks the white father’s “I don’t want no spook in my family” line. It’s compelling stuff. 

                    She was black as the night, 

                    Louie was whiter than whiter

                    Danger, danger, when you taste brown sugar, 

                    Louie fell in love overnight.

An American band, The Stories, covered it and got to No. 1 in the States with a far inferior version.

“Big River”, Johnny Cash - The Man in Black did any number of story songs, but this is my favourite. Here, in this tale of a man chasing a woman up and down the Mississippi, but continually missing her, his songwriting prowess reached a peak:

                    I  met her accidentally in St. Paul, Minnesota.

                    It tore me up every time I heard her drawl (Southern drawl),

                    Then I heard my dream went back downstream -

                    Cavortin’ in Davenport -

                    And I followed you, Big River, when you called

The phrase “cavortin’ in Davenport” is genius.

“Shoppin’ for Clothes” by  the Coasters is the heartrending 1960 tale of a cool cat who walks into a men’s clothing store and attempts to buy an ultra-sharp suit. Unfortunately, his credit rating turns out not to be good enough (depite the singer’s lament that he has “a good job, sweepin’ up, everyday!”. Those masters of popular song, Leiber and Stoller, at their sparkling, witty best:

Singer:        “That suit’s pure herringbone”

Salesman:    “That’s a suit you’ll never own”

May not look like much on the page - but just listen to it.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, by the Canadian folk-singer Gordon Lightfoot, tells the tale of the Great Lakes freighter which sank on Lake Superior in 1975. All 29 men on board died.

This song, released the following year, is as good as modern folk music gets – no wonder Bob Dylan is a big Lightfoot fan. Here are some highligjts from the the superb lyrics:

                    Does anyone know where the love of God goes

                    When the waves turn the minutes to hours…

                    Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings

                    In the ruins of her ice water mansion…

                    When supper time came the old cook came on deck

                    Saying fellows it's too rough to feed you

                    At 7PM a main hatchway caved in

                    He said fellas it's been good to know you.

                    In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed

                    In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral    

                    The church bell chimed, 'til it rang 29 times

                    For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And finally, the greatest story song of the modern era - “Ode to Billie Joe”, by Bobbie Gentry.

There may be a more mysterious, atmospheric single in pop history, but I haven’t heard it. Ms. Gentry, the writer and singer, has a beguilingly deep, smoky voice that may owe as much to her Portuguese origins as to her sultry Mississippi upbringing. There are definite horror elements here: as the narrator’s mother says, “nothing ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge”; what possessed Billie Joe McAllister to kill himself;:  most creepily of all, what was the “something” the narrator (or “a girl who looked a lot like you”) and Billie Joe were seen throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge by the young preacher, Brother Taylor?  

Why is the narrator’s family so casual about Billy Joe’s demise? Are teen suicides a regular occurrence around these parts? And why can’t the narrator “touch a single bite” after she hears the news about Billie Joe during the family dinner? Were they lovers? Many people - myself included - assume that a dead baby (or even a live one) is what was being tossed off the bridge. But if so,  who does it belong to? Not the narrator - her family would have noticed!

Apart from the plethora of mysteries, what makes this such compelling storytelling is the richness of specific detail. We learn it is the “3rd of June”, Papa still has “five more acres in the lower forty” to plough. They’re eating black-eyed peas. Later, there’s apple pie. Brother Taylor, who dropped by that day, is coming to dinner on Sunday. There’s a reference to childhood pranks at the Carroll County Picture Show. In the year following Billie Joe’s death, the narrator’s brother marries “Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo”, her father dies of a virus, and she spends a lot of time “picking flowers up on Choctaw Ridge” and dropping them “into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge” - the last line of the song, reminding us of what she and Billie Joe were seen doing earlier. Were they just throwing flowers when Brother Taylor saw them? 

Popular music doesn’t get any better or more intriguing than “Ode to Billie Joe”.