On Joe Purdy And "Song-stories"

As all of you are aware by now, I have a great deal of respect for songwriters who can tell stories in songs. Not first-person narration—that kind of song has difficulties of its own—but nothing is quite as difficult as the third-person song. Every single songwriter that I’ve interviewed has agreed with that sentiment. Other songwriters, such as Liz Longley, had never even thought about writing a third-person story into a song.

“I ought to try that,” she mused.

Most songwriters don’t bother with this kind of song. They can sound unwieldy and forced and they require the singer to sever the prized personal connection to the audience. It’s no secret that confessional-style songwriting, which had its heyday in the early 1970s with the heartbreaking lyrics of James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, can often work wonders on an audience. When James Taylor tells the audience, “Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone,” everyone swoons at the sadness of that line.

On the other hand, a songwriter might try their hand at a song that tells the story of a few down-on-their-luck characters and the audience could only manage to wince. There’s isn't as much personal energy invested in the story. The songwriter invokes not a template of "sinner" or "culprit," but rather the less emotionally dynamic role of the "storyteller."

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Steve Earle, in a class he once taught on the songwriting of Townes Van Zandt, which I did not actually have the pleasure of attending (I read the transcript!), described Van Zandt’s songs as quintessentially philosophical. Van Zandt liked to dig deep into a personal thought and expand upon it. That’s how he ended up with striking lyrics such as those of “To Live Is To Fly.” (“We’ve all got holes to fill / and them holes are all that’s real / some fall on you like a storm / sometimes you dig your own.”)

Van Zandt, Earle is quick to point out, also has a knack for “story-songs,” but he did tend more to the philosophical. On the other hand, Van Zandt’s close friend Guy Clark is a master of the story-song, with a far weaker grasp on the philosophical fare. Consider Clark’s tune about his relationship with his step-grandfather, “Desperadoes Waiting For A Train.”

I don’t know that I exactly concur with Earle’s somewhat curt division of the world of songs, but I think that he provides a valuable template to look at. For one, it helped me move past the greatly simplistic division of “third-person” / “first-person”—songs are not so simple.

I should admit that this mention of Earle, Van Zandt, and Clark is somewhat of a digression—loosely related to the theme, but a digression nonetheless. The point of this post is to posit that Joe Purdy, with whom some of you may be familiar, is an excellent story-song writer (story-songwriter?). Ever since I saw him perform, I had that knowledge tucked away in the back of my head—having experienced the story of “Outlaws." A careful piano number, the song starts off as a retelling of Bonnie and Clyde, a man picking up a woman in a “rose pink Cadillac,” before moving on to the first hesitant robbery, then the string of bank robberies…and, despite being only Purdy’s voice and piano, the song quietly surges with tension until you find out—oh…everything ends up fine. Purdy delivers that fact of their safety not as a revelation and entirely without irony; it all simply happened that way.

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But my recent Purdy obsession came in the form of “Mary May & Bobby,” a love song about a couple that was always meant to be. The song sets its first verse in fifth grade, as an infatuated Bobby walks an oblivious Mary May home from school. Purdy’s narrator is limited to Bobby, who “was listening to every word she said / like it was the gospel of the prophecies” and “went home singing ‘Who Wrote the Book of Love’ and ‘Try A Little Tenderness.’”






Bobby is all innocence here—citing a nonexistent text (“the gospel of the prophecies”) perhaps because he doesn’t think that any actual text can capture the emotion that he feels toward Mary May. Purdy’s voice even trails off at the end of the "gospel" line with syllables that suggest the words "or something." Additionally, Bobby walks home singing two largely innocent love songs, especially the Monotones’ “The Book of Love.” In the second verse, Purdy quotes Bobby as saying that he and Mary May could “live out by the sea / like they do on the movie screen,” again drawing out that innocence; Bobby doesn’t understand love on his own terms, but he can reflect it outward through popular culture. (The “movie screen” thought, however, sticks with him through high school to his next proposal.)

The third verse introduces an actual high school romance between the couple, but a romance that is severed by Mary May’s collegiate aspirations. The first part of the verse is largely in Mary May’s voice and the second part is Bobby’s response, which follows into the  proposal chorus. That long snippet of dialogue is crucial because it temporarily removes the presence of the narrator from the story. When we return to the story, we have left Bobby’s perspective and have now been limited to Mary May. Purdy’s character development of Mary in this verse is not original or particularly inspired, but that is part of what makes the story work so well; he leaves so much for the audience to fill in.

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The fact of the matter is that the moment Purdy enters into his description of an “independent businesswoman,” you already have a full stereotype drawn out in your head. But once you start to consider her character, you realize that Purdy has literally told us nothing about her emotional life. She is lonely, yes, but that’s not much of a character trait when you consider it alongside Bobby; you’d need only to glance at Bobby’s befuddled joy on walking Mary home in the first verse to have a sense that you’re dealing with a real character. Mary May is far more one-dimensional than that.

The real shocker of this song, once you start thinking about the impact of its final verse, is that we never hear an answer from Bobby. Purdy only provides us an echo of the first verse: “It was a fine day in the fifth grade / when Mary May let Bobby walk her home from school.” Are we to take those lines as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ from Bobby to her marriage proposal? My gut reaction is to say that Purdy is making a stab for ambiguity, but it’s worth further investigating Mary’s reasoning in the previous verse.

Thanks to the limited omniscient presence provided by Purdy’s narrator, we know that Mary is motivated to go find by selfishness. She “is lonely beyond belief…[and goes] home looking for the only love she’d ever known,” admitting that whether or not she loves Bobby is besides the point; she doesn’t want to be lonely any longer. The idea that Bobby is still waiting for her after all this time is even admittedly speculation (on either the part of Mary or the narrator): “Guess he never really gave up hope.” So this entire situation might be a fantasy on the part of Mary; she "stopped writing years ago" and has no idea what Bobby's life is like. She fills in the gaps of his life...just as we, as listeners, fill in the gaps of her life. Purdy is clever because we never find out whether our suppositions hold any truth to them.

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These details that hide just beneath the surface of the song are exactly why Purdy proves himself such an excellent songwriter. The temptation with story-songs is to assume that they offer up their story at face value. Other equally worthy songs, such as Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day,” (#2) have similar telling details that more fully reveal the story going on.