There’s a twist at the end of Jason Isbell’s song “Live Oak” that the Internet, or a corner of it anyway, debates.
The song involves a man who’s drifted into a farming community and entered into a relationship with a woman. The setting would appear to be the North Central Plains before World War II.
In his past, the narrator was part of a gang that robbed a Great Lakes freighter and killed two men. When rumors of that crime comes to his new farming community, he expects the woman he’s in a relationship with to be repulsed. Instead he discovers she might have seen this potential violence in him all along, and it drew her to him in the first place. The narrative unfolds with the economy of a Sherwood Anderson short story in a little over three minutes.
The online debate involves the last verse in which the woman dies, the man buries her and heads on further south. At least some listeners believe he kills his lover at the end. In their view the song is a murder story and a Gothic one at that.
I’m going to say this is flatly wrong, but I want to make a further point: the “reading” of the song that turns it into a murder story involves a mistaken approach to reading (or listening), one that is at least a first cousin of the more troubling tendency toward conspiracy theories that are now being inflamed regularly on the Internet near you.
So what’s wrong with the murder theory of the song? After all, lines early in the song tell us: “I never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze/ So I found another victim every couple days.”
And there’s the possibility that the narrator’s an unreliable one: when he thinks his lover is intrigued or excited by his murderous past, she may actually be fearful. He thinks she’ll expose him, so he kills her.
But I imagine you see the problem with this line of reasoning instantly. You have to create new narrative elements—his discovering her fear, his deciding only murder will get him out of the problem, and you have to ignore (and what you have to ignore is just as big as what you have to add) that there’s no hint that the narrator’s remorse is not real and deeply felt, or that his love for the woman is insincere. Nor are there internal hints that his assessment of her reactions is off base. (And you also have to ignore the metaphorical reading of those lines about “another victim every couple days.”)
The murder theory involves faulty inferential thinking. The reading goes beyond what’s implied. But it’s worse than that: it also makes its untoward leaps based on a biased preference, the preference for the sensational murder story over other alternatives.
This preference is rooted in psychology: by going beyond what is inferred, the reader/listener seizes power, erasing the narration’s force (and for that matter the author’s command—though as you’ll see in a second I’ll call that command into question). The reader/listener collapses the story’s mystery, the nuance that creates its real power and substitutes their own sensational fantasies.
This is where the overlap with conspiracy theorizing comes in. Conspiracy theories offer a way to erase the world and substitute our preferences. Erasing the story (about the actual world or a close approach to it) is satisfying because it puts to rest the unsettling vibration of uncertainty that the song, the story, the world sets up in us. By adding the bonus of allowing us to fill the now voided space (of story/song/world) with our own take, we gain the myriad satisfactions that come with confirming our preconceived views. All is right with the world. Indeed we’re in control of it.
As far as I know, Isbell has refused to say what happens in the song, and has even joked about it. I’m going to suggest that what he thinks happens, if he even has an opinion, would be interesting to know but would not sweep aside other interpretations.
The idea that the author’s opinion about their work is not definitive turns out to be a controversial one—as I’ve come to understand as a teacher of writing. My students greet me with astonished disbelief when I suggest that the author might not know any more about a story than the reader. Yet I believe this is true. Words escape our intentions—anyone who thinks carefully about language, will I believe come to this conclusion.
Perhaps you’re telling yourself right now that while arguing for open-endedness, uncertainty, and the irreducibility of stories, I’ve reduced the song to my favored interpretation.
So first of all, I’m not making a case for limitless, roll-your-own open-endedness. Stories have real gravitational fields that pull in settling directions.
But I’ll willingly muddy the waters. I’m against the murder theory, but I don’t think it’s wholly absent from the song. That earlier line about victims and the last verse describing her burial must raise in the listener the question of whether the narrator in fact killed her (though the care he takes in that burial and the evident time it would take argues against the murder thesis).
Rather I’ll say the hints of violence in the song are the way the narrator’s violent past and potentially violent present vibrate or radiate in the story. The murder possibility helps create the song’s emotional complexity, it just doesn’t determine its plot.
Here’s the lyrics. The song opens with the chorus:
There’s a man who walks beside me
he is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him
and confuses him with me
And I wonder who she’s pining for
on nights I’m not around
Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down
I was rougher than the timber shipping out of Fond du Lac
When I headed south at seventeen, the sheriff on my back
I’d never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze
So I found another victim every couple days
But the night I fell in love with her, I made my weakness known
To the fighters and the farmers digging dusty fields alone
The jealous innuendos of the lonely-hearted men
Let me know what kind of country I was sleeping in
Well you couldn’t stay a loner on the plains before the war
When my neighbors took to slightin’ me, I had to ask what for
Rumors of my wickedness had reached our little town
Soon she’d heard about the boys I used to hang around
We’d robbed a great-lakes freighter, killed a couple men aboard
When I told her, her eyes flickered like the sharp steel of a sword
All the things that she’d suspected, I’d expected her to fear
Was the truth that drew her to me when I landed here
There’s a man who walks beside me he is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me
And I wonder who she’s pining for on nights I’m not around
Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down
Well I carved her cross from live oak and her box from short-leaf pine
And buried her so deep, she’d touch the water table line
And picked up what I needed and I headed south again
To myself, I wondered, “Would I ever find another friend”
There’s a man who walks beside her, he is who I used to be
And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me
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