Sit Down Beside Me and Hear My Sad Story

Folk music was a terrible embarrassment at the progressive, Quaker-founded grade school I attended in the 1950s. Square dancing! A teacher dressed in floppy jeans and a Pendleton shirt standing on a box calling out "Swing your partner!" and "Dosey-doh!" Then the sing-alongs! The sententious, larded, corpse-like ballads about cowboys and laborers and fair maidens, mines and dungeons, sylvan glades and faraway shores! But only one person in our class had the nerve to force her parents to take her to the Auditorium Arena in Oakland to see Elvis Presley. It was 1956. Soon her parents would be dead on the highway.

"Dead on the highway" -- so much more romantic, more fated, than "killed in an auto accident." It's not language anyone used at the time to tell what had happened; it's the language of the American ballad, which seeks to make death into a story. For it to be a story, the song must make you want to listen. Thus, it calls upon metaphors from all across the land, reaching back across the Atlantic, across hundreds of years and uncounted generations, to catch your ear. "Dead on the highway": Those words could call back the English highwaymen whom President Theodore Roosevelt heard when he read John A. Lomax's "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads."

"There is something very curious in the reproduction here on our this new continent," Roosevelt wrote Lomax in 1910, "of essentially the conditions of ballad-growth which obtained in medaeval England; including, by the way, sympathy for the outlaw, Jesse James taking the place of Robin Hood."

"Dead on the highway": To say that, to make these two deaths into a ballad, or to weave them into a ballad about someone else -- a trucker in the night, a thief on the run, a killer fleeing the police or looking for his next victim, Pretty Boy Floyd or James Dean -- would be to do many things. It would make them heroic, dramatizing their whole lives as an attempt to escape from enemies too powerful even to name. It would seek to mark their deaths as an event, at once singular and part of a tradition -- to raise these people out of the crowd of the anonymous and at the same time join them to a community, even if a community of the dead.