Bruce the Bush-whacker

The Last Straw: Thanks to Bruce Springsteen, I've been going around all week singing Ballad of Jesse James, with its insanely catchy chorus: "That dirty little coward/ That shot Mr Howard/ He laid poor Jesse in his grave."

As everyone knows, the coward was Bob Ford, who shot the famous outlaw in the back while he (James) was hanging a picture. But the question you're asking is: "Who was Mr Howard, and why was he important enough to merit a sub-clause in the chorus?" Fortunately for both of us, I've already looked it up. It turns out that "Mr Howard" was James himself, in an alias created after his gang was scattered and he was on the run. The songwriter couldn't resist the rhyme, obviously, even at the risk of making the event sound like a double murder. Then again, it might as well have been a massacre, such was the outlaw's popularity by then.

Long-time readers of this column will know that Jesse James was a pioneer of the public relations industry. After his and his brother Frank's early careers as Confederate bushwhackers and mass killers, they turned their image around through the help of a sympathetic editor at the Kansas City Star. As they took to holding up banks, and later trains, they also took to leaving press releases at crime scenes. They became entertainers too, hamming it up for the audiences who unwittingly attended their spectacles.

According to Wikipedia, the later train robberies "had a lighter touch", in which the Jameses made a point of not robbing passengers. Their image as American Robin Hoods was secure by the time they lost most of their gang in a Minnesota bank raid.

Frank tried to go straight. But like old boxers, old bushwhackers rarely get out at the top. Jesse made a comeback at 32, notching up another series of bank raids until, fatally, he took to hanging pictures.

He might have been hanged himself, eventually. But it was popular opinion, shared by his own gang members, that he couldn't be taken alive. Thus the Ford brothers sensibly waited for a rare moment in which the usually paranoid "Mr Howard" had his gun-belt off and his back turned.

Unfortunately for them, James was a marketing genius to the end. The public's love of a rhyme meant that Ford's craven act was instantly famous. The Jameses' fierce mother, who reared her boys to be the upstanding bushwhackers they were, and once lost an arm in a botched attack by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, even included a reference to the "coward" on Jesse's tombstone. When Ford himself was murdered years later, the killer got off with a two-year sentence. Such is the power of PR.

THERE ARE SOME grimly humorous lyrics on Springsteen's The Seeger Sessions. Take My Oklahoma Home, in which a dustbowl refugee laments the loss of his house, farm and - eventually - his wife: "She blowed away/ She blowed away/ My Oklahoma woman blowed away/ Mister as I bent to kiss her/ She was picked up by a twister/ My Oklahoma woman blown away." The writer blows away himself, by and by, but feels at home everywhere because his farm is always in the air around him: "Makes no difference where I'm walkin'/ I can hear my chickens squawkin'/ I can hear my wife a-talkin' in their air." They don't write songs like that any more.

Nor like Mrs McGrath, an Irish ballad from the Napoleonic era, in which a mother berates her returning soldier son for losing his legs. "Stumps of a tree won't do at all/ Why didn't you run from the cannonball?" she asks. Of course, in joining her tirade against "foreign wars", Springsteen is not targeting Napoleon. Bruce is a modern-day Bush-whacker, and proud of it. Notwithstanding which, the London Evening Standard, reviewing his concert, described Mrs McGrath as a "sinister Irish rebel war-cry". Hard to beat that for grim humour.

THIS IS A mostly true story. I was sitting in a cafe in Dublin 8 on Thursday - the same one outside which my bike was stolen last year - reading about the death of Jesse James, when a woman I'd never met before approached me and asked: "Are you the 98FM fugitive?" Not as far as I know, I told her. The only thing from which I was a fugitive was my column deadline, I said. But barely two minutes later, another stranger, also female, asked me the same question.

Apparently 98FM is some sort of radio station, and the "fugitive" is a man who gives money to anyone that identifies him. Listeners had been told he was in the area. But how was I to know? I wasn't waiting for any more bounty hunters. Packing up my papers on the James gang, hurriedly, I left through a side door.