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Bill Hayes, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett"
(March 26, 1955)
I never daydreamed about the frontier as a kid. The frontier was the burnt orange territories on maps of the fifty states. The frontier was empty of content.
A small detail of my intellectual development worth relating: most archetypes of radical autonomy that've fascinated generations of young American boys -- pirates, knights, cowboys & indians -- meant nothing to me growing up. I was something of a loner as a child, and thus am left with no definitive experience on the matter, but I don't believe any of my peers cared much, either. It was all dinosaurs at first, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, then a little later video games and comic books and cars. Even with the Bicentennial in recent memory, the cast of characters in The Story of Young America all seemed like quaint concerns.
Davy Crockett was the archetypical fad of sometimelongago before I knew anything of his legend, or the facts behind the legend, and the
sum total of everything I've ever known of the facts or the legend has been close to nil. No, at best he's the Disney character that sold a million coonskin caps.
So I approach this song with no romance at all. You could argue that my approach to the songs I've been reviewing has been romance-free, but you would think a song about a legend -- however mediated by the marketplace -- might tickle the same parts of my brain that respond to Volume 1 of the Anthology of American Folk Music. But no. Its roots aren't deep into the American mystic but the pure product of "the fifties." All its cornpone, the cute contractions and the tale tales about Crockett killin' him a BAHR when he was only three and patchin' up the crack in the Liberty Bell is capped with:
His land is biggest, and his land is best
From grassy plains to the mountain crest
He's ahead of us all in meeting the test
Followin' his legend right into the West
His land is my land, his land is your land, our land can totally kick the other guy's land's ass because ALL AMERICANS ARE DAVY CROCKETTS, except that he's also AHEAD OF US ALL in meeting THE TEST, which is the THREAT OF International COMMINISM. Clearly. OK, OK, it's liminally sung from the POV of the settlers trailing behind Crockett, "test" was probably put there just to serve as a second-rate rhyme for "West," but it surely beyond serendipity that we can read these lines as saying that Crockett's a figure of virtue for all good Americans of the 20C can emulate. The top 40 strikes me as a weirdly inappropriate place for patriotism: when it's there, it brings pop into the realm of social control (or at least in ways more obvious than usual), and anchors music too firmly into the realm of moral duty when a play of values usually reigns. Yeah, I believe America is the greatest country in the world and all, but I don't reach for the radio to affirm this. 2.
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