Pretty Boy Floyd

Woody Guthrie wrote a great song about the outlaw Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd in 1939, five years after Pretty Boy was killed by police. The admixture of truth and falsity in that song are delightful and instructive.

The song is direct. Pretty Boy was in the town of Shawnee, Oklahoma with his wife on a Saturday afternoon. A police office accosted Floyd "in a manner rather rude. Using vulgar words of language, and his wife she overheard."

In the song, Floyd does what any red-blooded American man would do at the time, we are given to believe. He killed the policeman in hand to hand combat for having cursed in front of a lady. In an interview for the Smithsonian Institute, recorded a year after Guthrie wrote Pretty Boy Floyd, Guthrie explained that in those days, if you used rough language in front of a lady, "you'd better smile. Or duck."

Thus forced upon a life of crime by cruel fate, Pretty Boy -- the song tells us -- went into the hills of Oklahoma to hide out from the law. And oh, the unspeakable shame, Pretty Boy did this just as the depression was getting in full swing. He was blamed -- wrongfully -- for several bank robberies, at a pretty much implausible rate. There'd be five banks in five counties, all robbed at lunch time today and all blamed on Pretty Boy. And all the farmers had a good laugh because they knew good old FLoyd was hanging out innocently -- knitting socks for babies, perhaps -- in the hills.

Finally, as Guthrie explained in an interview, Floyd decided to "take the cash and let the credit go." He thus decided to embark on an actual life of bank robbing glee.

As Arlo Guthrie would explain another 45 years later, "Pretty Boy was a bank robber at a time in the country, and a place in the country, when he was not the worst of disasters." The song describes a decent Robin Hood of a man, who distributed stolen booty to farmers to help them pay their mortgages. In Oklahoma City, on Christmas Day, he left a car load of groceries for the poor, the dear heart. The letter that the song says Floyd left with those groceries provide more than one of the immortal lines of Woody Guthrie:

As through this world I've rambled, I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen
But as through this world you ramble, yes and as through this world you roam
You will never find an outlaw, who'll drive a family from his home

Great stuff. And all absolute, frantic bullocks.

The real history of Pretty Boy is as unromantic as the life of a brutal SOB usually is. Floyd was imprisoned for petty theft in his teens and was never again not in trouble. He was absolutely not introduced to crime via a log chain fight with a cursing cop in Shawnee.

What is true? Lots. He really was accused of perpetrating a large number of robberies scattered over an enormous geographic area. Problem: he really did them. Pretty Boy would rob one bank in the morning and flee at top mounted speed until afternoon. Thus creating each robbery as the alibi for the other.

What else? Floyd really did help struggling farmers by distributing booty to those who needed it. Robin Hood? No. This is a cold reading trick: every farmer needed it. Pretty Boy gave stolen money in modest amounts as hush money, to guarantee his safe and comfortable passage.

Now, it really all comes together when you get two additional pieces of information:

1. Guthrie was not an economist. He was a conspiracy theorist.

- In the Library of Congress interview (these were conducted by Alan Lomax, by the way, and improve toward the end when Alan Lomax gets palpably drunk and starts singing along and cracking bad jokes) -- as I say, in those interviews, Guthrie expresses a belief that banks weren't really in the trouble they professed to be in. That evil capitalist bankers were pretending to be robbed -- in fact, it was inside jobs -- so they could, what? claim hardship? and close their doors, rather than go out of business in the manly old way. It was these fake, inside job bank robberies, that were blamed on Floyd.

- Guthrie's populist frustration is real, and legitimate. When the money supply suffered a vicious contraction in the early depression, it also migrated away from farms. Farmers couldn't sell as high when city folks began gardening more, they all defaulted to local banks, and rural states came to a stand still.

2. The way it all started isn't even in the song.

- Guthrie's Pretty Boy legend would be more complete but less intriguing, if he had remembered to include all of it in the song. But Guthrie was a story teller, and a great one. He expected a song to be complemented by a story. He also knew that legend songs increase in grandeur when worn down on the sharp edges. 400-year-old songs are always agglomerative messes, incomplete or ill-fitted somewhere. Guthrie's ballads, in my opinion, attempt to recreate that old messy style in the original. They are the acid wash jeans of folk music.

- In an interview, Guthrie tells us the rest of the story. The reason the cop came us cursing, way back on that Saturday afternoon in Shawnee, was that Pretty Boy was in violation of the law. Since Floyd had last been in town, a new ordinance had been passed. It held that horses could no longer be tied to the rail along main street while folks conducted their business. As Guthrie explained "the motorcar had gotten to be pretty popular, and you had to make room." So Pretty Boy was innocently in violation of a parking ordinance. Seems like nothing, until you recall the time and set the picture. The gulf between all those struggling farmers who used their work horses to go to town, and the well-to-do who had a motorcar, was huge. Guthrie is pushing all the right populist buttons when the cop who started it all was yelling at a poor man who simply couldn't afford a car, and didn't show the proper respect to those who could, by either tying up outside of town, or paying tribute at the livery.

Pretty Boy Floyd is a great ballad. It holds a wee bit of true history from the depression and a huge dose of populist paranoia. The early progressive era needed the American heroes that traditional America had been creating -- sometimes from whole cloth -- for a hundred and fifty years. Guthrie, an unintententional but consistent genius, was providing the instant mythology that was called for by the circumstances.

History is beautiful.