Wednesday, July 26, 2006

"Me and Billy the Kid," Mythology, and the American West

Lyrad's post on the Joe Ely show reminded me a story Ely told when I saw him about his song "Me and Billy the Kid." Ely was at the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. While Billy the Kid's grave is there, the museum itself has almost nothing about him. Instead it's a pile of junk--old saddles, guns, cowboy equipment, etc. Ely said that if they are going to advertise themselves as a museum on Billy the Kid and not say anything about him at all, that he could do the same thing in a song. And so here's what he wrote:

Well, me and Billy The Kid never got along:
I didn't like the way he cocked his hat and he wore his gun all wrong.
Well, we had the same girlfriend and he never forgot it.
She had a cute little Chihuahua till one day he up and shot it.
He rode the hard country down the New Mexico line.
He had a silver pocket watch that he never did wind.
He crippled a piano player for playin' his favorite song.
Yeah, me and Billy The Kid, we ain't never got along.
Yeah, me and Billy The Kid never got along:
I didn't like the way he buckled his belt and he wore his gun all wrong.
He was bad to the bone, all hopped up on speed.
I would've left him alone if it wasn't for that senorita:
He gave her silver and he paid her hotel bill.
But it was me she loved: she said she always will.
I'd always go see her whenever Billy was gone
Yeah, me and Billy The Kid, we never got along.

Yeah, me and Billy The Kid never got along:
I didn't like the way he buckled his boots an' he wore his gun all wrong.
One day, I said to Billy: "I got this foolproof scheme.
"We'll rob Wells Fargo, it's bustin at the seams."
I admit that I framed him. I don't feel no remorse.
It was just my way of gettin' even with the man who shot my horse.
Yeah, Billy reached for his gun but his gun was on wrong.
Yeah, me and Billy The Kid, we never got along.

Well, me and Billy The Kid never got along:
But I did like the way he swayed in the wind while I played him his favorite song.
Now my baby sings harmony with me, to "La Cucaracha".
She winds her silver pocket watch and pets her new Chihuahua.
I moved into the hotel, I got a room with a shower.
We lay an' listen to that watch tick hour after hour.
Outside, I hear the wind blowin' oh so strong:
Me and Billy The Kid, we never got along!

We never got along.

Ely's song is obviously tongue in cheek and remains popular with his audience to this day. Although, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of this particular number. But in any case, I think it says a lot about the way we remember our past. Particularly with the American West, Americans use the region and an interpretation of its history to justify their own position in life. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Ronald Reagan with his ranch and the cowboy image that he liked to portray. Of course, Reagan was not a westerner by birth. But then again, neither were a lot of the Orange County folks who were his base. Figures like Reagan and John Wayne were popular at least in part because they promoted a myth of the individualistic West that many postwar Americans felt they had lost. By projecting their belief that the West was a land where the single, tough, masculine individual could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make a go of it, they perhaps believed that a touch of that could survive in Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Land.

The post-1960s image of Native Americans as touchstones of spirituality is the flip side of the coin. Native Americans have their own relationships with the land, their own belief systems, and their own rituals, but they are neither more nor less legitimate, true, or authentic than Catholicism, Islam, or indigenous African religions. These Native American religions took on western clothing, both because many more indigenous peoples live in the West these days, but also because Indians taking peyote on the Navajo nation makes for a much better image than Indians in Massachusetts. The West is an integral part of this myth. Again, we see the West as a place where individuals can go to get in touch with a spirituality impossible in the urbanized East. While most of the people who buy into this myth would be horrified to be compared to the fans of John Wayne (in fact I know many people who hate The Searchers based solely on its portrayal of Native Americans without considering the actual quality of the film), but in reality their view of the West is grounded in the same individualistic mythology that the West holds something we cannot have in modern society. What they want is different but where to find it is the same.

It's not too different for environmentalists either. In a lot of ways, environmentalists split the difference between the Wayne fans and the Native American fetishists here. They would identify more with those who see the West as the location of Native American spirituality, but for the environmental community, the West is a place of rugged landscapes where the individual can go and regenerate themselves from the enervating city. Monument Valley is not just where John Ford movies were shot. It's also on the Navajo Nation and an archetype of rugged landscapes that need protection from any development. To an unfortunately large extent, environmentalists over the past thirty years have turned their attention to wilderness protection, wilderness that exists almost entirely in the American West, instead of focusing on more human-centric issues or for that matter protecting smaller landscapes in the East from the development--landscapes that humans will actually use as oppose to someplace in Alaska that 2,000 people a year go to. The myth of the lonely man in the wilderness has near-fascist implications. Edward Abbey pushed these ideas and his influence on modern environmentalism is less than ideal--his ideas about the interactions between humans and the environment were wrong-headed at best and dangerous at worst.

Conservatives, hippies, and environmentalists have all mythologized the West for their own purposes. Songwriters might as well do the same thing.