Just to Watch Him Die

Violence and Horror in Country Music and the Blues

America’s twin musical darlings, country music and the blues, have been called many things: some are flattering, others are too rude to print. Horror, however, is usually left off the list. Yet despite both genres’ largely harmless reputations, they have together contributed some of the darkest and bloodiest images in all of popular music. For more than a century, in fact, country and blues singers have dealt in mass murder, explicit violence, even demonic possession, some of the very same subjects so beloved by today’s death metal bands and gangster rappers. Real horror—and by that I mean dark mythology, gruesome death, and pervasive dread—lies at the very heart of this uniquely American music.

Legend has it that the teenage Robert Johnson, hanging around the older musicians he admired in the Mississippi Delta, couldn’t pick guitar or sing worth a shit. Then, after returning from an unexplained absence, he could play the blues as fine as anyone had ever heard, including his idol, the legendary Delta bluesman Son House. “He sold his soul to the devil to get to play like that,” Son House declared and many others still agree.

Born in 1911 and murdered by a jealous husband in 1938, Robert Johnson survives as a bloodstained myth shrouded in mystery. Almost nothing of him remains; there is his music, of course, several photographs, a death certificate, and the recollections of those that knew him or saw him perform. He recorded some 40 tracks, including alternate takes, for the Vocalion label between 1936 and 1937. Horror, both real and imagined, permeates this maddeningly brief collection.

In his “32-20 Blues” (a reference to the Smith & Wesson model handgun), Johnson threatens an unfaithful woman with the promise that his pistol will “cut her half in two.” He warns, “If I send for my baby, man, and she don’t come; all the doctors in Hot Springs sure can’t help her none.” In his “Me and the Devil Blues,” a slow-building song of hypnotic power, complete with casual references to both domestic violence and the supernatural, Johnson ends with this couplet: “You may bury my body down by the highway side; so my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”

And then there is the frightening, disorienting vision of Johnson’s masterpiece, “Hell Hound on My Trail,” probably the reason some folks still believe he cut that deal with the Devil. “I got to keep moving,” Johnson sings in his high, expressive voice, echoed by that insistent slide guitar. “Blues falling down like hail.” Later, “the day keeps on worryin’ me, it’s a hell hound on my trail. Hell hound on my trail.” This chilling self-portrait, revealing a man driven by torment and terror, ranks among the finest blues ever recorded. As far as hearing Johnson perform it in some Delta juke joint on a dark night, maybe even the one that finally claimed his life, well, that would certainly have been something.

What Robert Johnson did for the blues, Jimmie Rodgers did for country. A stunningly original vocalist whose life was also cut tragically short (dead of tuberculosis in 1933 at age 35), Rodgers blurred the lines between country, blues, and jazz, creating a wholly unique sound that influenced singers as varied as Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Robert Johnson himself, all of whom performed Rodgers’ songs.

In his “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” recorded in 1927 and released on the Victor imprint, Jimmie Rodgers provided country music with an image of such vivid and sadistic violence that it still reverberates. “I’m gonna buy me a pistol just as long as I’m tall,” he declares. “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma just to see her jump and fall.” Stop and take a moment to visualize that.

In 1957, three decades after Rodgers shot poor Thelma, rising country star Johnny Cash referenced that act of cruelty in his Top Five smash “Folsom Prison Blues.” “I shot a man in Reno,” Cash thunders, “just to watch him die.” In 1969, recording a live album before the inmates of California’s notorious San Quentin prison, bellowing that brutal line earned Cash as bloodthirsty a roar of approval as any convict could want.

Over the course of five decades in music, Johnny Cash sang, again and again, about both the dark desires and dirty deeds that landed men either behind bars or cold in the county morgue. In 2000, Columbia Records released a career-spanning compilation of Cash’s music entitled Murder, featuring 16 killer songs about killing, almost half of which were written by Cash himself (in the liner notes, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino hails Cash for his tales of “hillbilly thug life”). The lead track, “Delia’s Gone,” a Cash original based on the traditional country blues “Delia,” is about as cold-blooded as country music gets. Our lovely victim—supermodel Kate Moss played her in the music video—is tied to a chair, almost certainly tortured, shot and killed (“hard to watch her suffer; but with the second shot she died”). At song’s end, facing justice, Cash laments, “jailer I can’t sleep; ’cause all around the bedside I hear the patter of Delia’s feet.”

A tale of sadistic murder and a ghost story—how’s that for horror? Furthermore, that patter of dead feet itself echoes an earlier apparition, referencing perhaps the most famous blues of them all. The song “Stagolee”—or “Stagger Lee,” “Stack O Lee,” etc., depending on the version—first appeared around the twilight of the nineteenth century. The subject, briefly, concerns the murder of one Billy Lyons by “that bad man” Stagolee, who shot Lyons dead over a five-dollar Stetson hat, usually in a St. Louis whorehouse called, fittingly enough, the Bucket of Blood. Hundreds of blues and hillbilly singers have recorded it, including one particularly haunting version by Mississippi John Hurt. There are more than 20 jazz recordings, including cuts by Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington. Malcom X cited it favorably. Black Panther Bobby Seale named his son Stagolee.

In Bob Dylan’s fierce version, released on Columbia Records in 1993, performed with just acoustic guitar and harmonica, and based, he says, on that of country pioneer Frank Hutchinson, “Stack A Lee” suffers the same fate as Delia’s killer. “Jailer I can’t sleep,” Dylan wails, “because all around the bedside Billy Lyons began to creep.” These two specters—the patter of dead Delia’s feet and Billy Lyons ghostly creep—remind me of nothing so much as Edgar Allan Poe’s chilling Tell-Tale Heart, where the undead beating of the old man’s heart rings in his killer’s ears, rising through the floorboards that conceal his dismembered corpse.

Sadly, today’s country music establishment seems determined to keep these murderous skeletons buried deep in the closet. To give one telling example, at the time of his death in 2003, Johnny Cash had been virtually absent from mainstream country radio for well over a decade, despite having released a series of brilliant new albums from the mid-1990s into the new millennium. As for the blues, aside from nostalgia night at one of B.B. King’s chain of flashy nightclubs, that genre is as dead as poor Billy Lyons.

And yet, the dead still cast their shadows. Glenn Danzig, the founder and original singer for horror-punk legends The Misfits, not only openly flaunts his outlaw country and Delta blues roots, he actually wrote a song for Johnny Cash (“Thirteen”) that made it onto Cash’s brilliant 1994 album American Recordings. And then there’s Nick Cave, the cadaverous balladeer whose morbid sound combines punk, blues, goth, pop, and industrial. Cave has both recorded with Johnny Cash and contributed one of the sickest versions of “Stagger Lee” yet, elevating Stack to a jive-talking, bisexual spree killer.

What's “the ever elusive point," as Nick Tosches puts it? Just play a few of these records come Halloween. You’ll see what I mean.