Killers as American Folk Heroes

It's an old weird thing.

The positive public reaction to Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, got me thinking about Jesse James, the famous bank and train robber and killer, who didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor, but I grew up thinking he did, because that’s what the song says, and that’s what counts.

Songs plural, actually. I knew two about Jesse James when I was a kid, with overlapping themes and lines, one from a 78 rpm (!) children’s record and the other just out there in the ether, I guess. The former is less familiar today than the latter, but it’s the first one I knew, and its chorus includes, in my memory anyway, the words “I'll meet you in that land where I've never been before/And l’ll never see my Jesse any more,” which sparked my childhood imagination in a scary kind of way.

I have a vivid memory of my mother explaining those lines as referring to heaven. She also explained the moment when Jesse was shot in the back by “little Robert Ford, for the sake of a reward,” which I don’t see in the published lyrics to the closest thing that I can find to this more obscure version I’m talking about, though I could swear those words were on the record.

Or maybe my mother knew them from somewhere else. Or, most likely, my memory is wrong. My mother was fairly tall, and in this memory she’s very tall, because I’m very small, looking up from where I’m sitting on the rug in my parents’ bedroom, playing with small plastic soldiers or cowboys or something. The record’s on, and Mom's happy to be leaning down and telling me about Jesse James and Robert Ford, because it's exciting and in its way sort of funny.

The closest thing I can find to the record that exists in my memory is a track recorded by the “folk” act the Chad Mitchell Trio at the height of the “folk” craze, and while the timing’s right, that’s not the recording we had in our apartment, and the words don’t all match up with my memory. Paul Clayton may have written the version I’m thinking of; anyway, I can’t find it and it doesn’t matter. If there was anything I knew, growing up, it was that Jesse James was shot in the back while “trying to straighten out a picture frame,” as the record had it, because it was my mother who told me how that went down, and your mother telling you things is how you know them. Carrying out a familiar domestic dad chore, Jesse got snuck up on by little Robert Ford. You could just see it. To this day, I check my surroundings before straightening pictures.

The better-known version was made popular by Pete Seeger, I think. Not triste first-person like the other, and more bluntly narrative, it gives Jesse a wife and children and brings in Jesse’s brother Frank, making for a fun tale of two awesome brothers robbing banks and trains, as awesome brothers naturally do, and the people naturally love them for it, because the brothers, awesomely enough, steal from the rich and give to the poor. It’s all good until Robert Ford and that stupid picture frame.

And that’s just two songs. The Jesse story had a much bigger life than that. Some lurid b-picture comes on the black-and-white Philco and my brothers and I and our friends are like “Frank and Jesse. Boss-ay” and stare at it. The James brothers were members in good standing of the 24/7 party in my head where all the real ones hung out: Robin Hood, originator of the steal-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor trend, also Superman, Batman, King Arthur, Davy Crockett, his alter ego Daniel Boone, all those guys. Quite a happening scene, and everyboy who was anyboy knew it, or so I assumed. The first time I heard Dylan’s “Ain't gonna hang no picture, ain’t gonna hang no picture frame/I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James,” I didn’t think “Hm. Bob Dylan too seems to know about the picture-frame moment.” Everybody did, I assumed, so I just chuckled, as intended, at the unusual spin on something as familiar as the air to me, to Dylan, to everybody growing up after WWII.

Many of you already know this, but just to review: In real life, Frank and Jesse James, despite being presented by the likes of Pete Seeger as champions of the people, were just two of the many mean, lowlife shitheels caught up in and perpetrating a culture of reckless violence peculiar to their time and place.