When we decided to make this gun week at Gloomy Tunes, we figured it would be easy to find songs decrying guns. But not so fast. I don’t think I’m making nay news here, but American music loves its guns. Many of our greatest songwriters and performers wrote and performed songs that valorize guns and gunfighters. No matter what the NRA and the cultural right chooses to think, rappers were not the first musicians to shoot from the hip. “Stagger Lee shot Billy,” we’re told (as a female chorus sings “go, Stagger Lee” in Lloyd Price’s hit version). When Johnny Cash sang “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” I would cheer just as loudly as everyone else, and so did you. Sure, we were taking our cue from the audience on Live at Folsom Prison, but we still cheered. And we haven’t even touched the rich vein of Murder Ballads. And one of the scariest gun songs out there is “32-30 Blues,” specifically Robert Johnson’s version.
Taking its title from a size of Winchester ammunition, and recorded in his second recording session on November 26, 1936 in San Antonio, Texas, his murderous intent is from the first verse. He imagines what his woman don’t come when called, “all the doctors in Hot Springs” won’t be able to save her. He’ll take his rifle and cut her in half. She has a gun as well, a .38 Special, which he thinks is much too light. But in their gunfight it did its work, and he’s lying with his 32-20 across his chest.
(Do not take any of this as a condemnation of these songs, or as a politically correct call to extract them from the canon. We mean nothing of the sort. They are great, important works and are part of our cultural birthright. But we do think if we’re going to make any headway with reasonable gun owners and find a way forward, we need to understand and appreciate the way guns have permeated our culture.)
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