William Cocke writes:
>
>Off the top of my head, Kansas was called "Bloody Kansas"
>in the decade or so leading up to the Civil War because it
>was a hotbed of unrest and violence due to the fact that it
>wasn't certain which way it would enter the Union -- slave
>or free. Thus it became sort of a magnet for extremists on
>both sides of the slavery issue. Shoot-outs, murders,
>lynchings, and what we would call terrorism today, all took
>place in Kansas in the 1850s, as both sides tried to win
>the upper hand. In a way it was a ghastly foreshadowing of
>what was to come.
>
>It's an interesting and mostly successful songwriting
>attempt in an album full of good songs. I especially like
>the imagery of (I'm paraphrasing here) the singer being
>frightened of "an old man standing there hot as a pepper."
>I get the image of some fanatical John Brown-type ready to
>kill everyone in sight or maybe a bitter slaveowner come to
>retrieve his "property." I don't know if the word
>"salivating" used in the song was in common parlance at the
>time, but poetic license I always say...
The John Brown image is one that comes to my mind when I hear the lines
William is referring to: "What we've all come to fear/Is a pepper on fire
like that old man."
The lyrics I've been able to decipher thus far are approximately:
I'm the law
I've been sent over yonder mountains
>From the civilized side, this all looks so wild
A land that has never been tempered
Can't properly quench this savage call
What we've all come to fear
Is a pepper on fire like that old man
I don't know why you're standing there salivating
When folks have taken to naming
This Free Soiler state you're laying in
They say "Kansas, yeah, Kansas bleeding Kansas," back home
I'm fuzzier on the second verse, so I won't attempt to transcribe it here,
but it's got references to jayhawks and rifles and other Kansan sorts of
things. I can't begin to guess what prompted them to write it--maybe Amy
was reading Russell Banks' recent novel about John Brown--but I think it's
cool as hell, and I admit, a little reluctantly, to being pleased to see a
girl lyricist covering things other than conventional girl songwriter
topics--y'know, like love and that kind of thing. Before anybody flames me,
I'm not suggesting that Amy and Deborah are the first girls to write about
a range of topics other than l-u-v; I'm just admiring their lyrical
approach.
--Amy, who could talk about the Damnations all day long
