Are We All Just Waiting around to Die?
Shel Silverstein, Townes Van Zandt, Michael Hurley, Connie Converse
Is every fear the fear of death? It’s got a pithy power to it, but I think it might be too glib. Regardless, many a-fear boils down to death.
It’s a folk trope: the felon awaiting hanging, forced to fear death or dare otherwise. Life catches up to the singer, and instinct kicks in. Do they reflect, naming regrets and counting blessings, or do they resist, leaving the earth kicking and screaming?
Shel Silverstein, “25 Minutes to Go”
I knew it as a Johnny Cash song. Well, turns out it’s a cover. Silverstein sings a good lunatic. Five minutes pass and I figure he’s worked himself most of the way up, but he’s far from peak yet. He grows hoarse, shouting. This is the reflection-less version, all gallows humor. Anger at the warden, anger at his lawyer, etc. It’s not that I don’t feel bad for him, but he doesn’t exactly build sympathy either. Calling on anyone in earshot, he gets left hanging—literally.
Townes Van Zandt, “Waiting Around to Die”
This was my intro to Townes Van Zandt, and it remains the song to which I compare all his others to—which seems proper considering he claims it’s the first song he ever wrote. Yes, there is the opposite, gentle pole in his songwriting, embodied in my mind by “I’ll Be Here in the Morning.” But I like sad cowboy TVZ, the nihilist, the addict. He seldom approaches the absolute despair of “Waiting Around,” though he gets close on “Dollar Bill Blues.” Listen to the version on Live and Obscure if you can find it, which I can’t seem to do on youtube.
The title says it all: abject hopelessness. The whole time Van Zandt’s voice risks slipping into sobs, not quite cracking but also not not cracking. He professes to have once had not just a mom but a dad, as if that small fact was absurd, impossible for him to believe even as he sings it.
I’d never thought about the harmonica that drifts in and out of this song. The opposite of Dylan’s employment, TVZ’s version comments on the narrative like a chorus, nestling itself into a little sorrowful home between the bars.
Last, there’s his lone friend, codeine, made all too real by Van Zandt’s actual addictions, which included oddities like glue-huffing. He once fells asleep with a sock full of glue in his mouth. When he awoke, his mouth was glued shut. The only solution: a hammer to the teeth, the teeth knocked out.
Michael Hurley, “Grand Canyon Line”
That’s right, more Hurley. Get used to it. He occupies a rent-controlled apartment in my mind; he’s going to be here for awhile.
Fleeing the law, Hurley hops trains, “sitin’ all alone in a boxcar’s four walls,” he sings, like a love-sick Richard Lovelace, fate confining him to a spiritual prison as much as a physical one. Framing Hurley’s predicament, both an interpersonal loss—“I thought about my sweetheart and I started to cry”—and class resentment—facing death for “a break in the rich man’s law.”
Before he breaks into the chorus the first time, Hurley sings some nonsense syllables, swaggering over a swung beat. I imagine him snapping his fingers, eye’s closed, full with the music to the point of overflow. The piano bangs joyfully like something inside a honkytonk. Bluesy yet upbeat. Boogie-inducing. The song becomes a celebration of this archetypal narrative: the young man down on his luck; the crime justified, nose thumbed to the man; train-hopping on the western railways, boxcars and natural expanse; the evil law, and with it, fate, which no amount of rambling can long evade. A celebration because Hurley himself sings it with “five hours to live.” The gallows built, a crowd assembled. Facing the end—“now I must die,” he sings, weirding his death, in the archaic sense—Hurley recounts the whole escapade, strumming songs alone in a boxcar like a fugitive Woody Guthrie.
Connie Converse, “The Clover Saloon”
Converse is a real oddity, penning fully-realized and surrealistic folk ballads in the mid-50s before Dylan ever reached the Village. But she was there, in NYC, singing to deaf ears.
I like to pair “The Clover Saloon” with “Roving Woman,” imagining a shared narrator. Forced into passivity—albeit an all-knowing sort—as the Roving Woman, the “I” heads west and plays cowhand. There, she (the gender of Clover Saloon’s narrator isn’t specified, but bare with me) seeks something like peak pleasure:
I've got one ambition like wishing for the moon
To drink a glass of pleasure, full measure
Bulging out and brimming over at The Clover Saloon
Call it what you want: complete contentment, ecstasy, death, jouissance. It’s a radical ask, and it costs Converse her life. But facing her hanging, the hankering persists. Like Hurley’s, Converse’s version of the narrative refuses fear, or at least fear exclusively. Life, boiled down, becomes a search for that glass of pleasure. Let’s not die thirsty.
Thank you for exploring through folk music the complex and unimaginable (to me) emotions that one experiences in the moments preceding death. It is interesting to see how artists conceive of these feelings. The upbeat pace of these works, particularly those of Silverstein & Hurley, stands out to me. I believe it reflects the simultaneous feelings of end-of-life anxiety + the power of having certainty of one's own fate. Also, I imagine feelings surrounding one's looming death (or at least imagining it) as a younger person with energy is different than for an older/sickly person.
It seems like we can learn a lot about someone's life perspective whether they choose to reflect or resist in the face of a forced death. I want to say that one's answer might even reflect their morality. Interesting topic and breadth of songs.