James Beaty: OPINION: RAMBLIN' REWIND: White House records -- songs about presidents
Aug. 24—EDITOR'S NOTE — Former Managing Editor James Beaty died May 12, 2024. Over the next few months, the McAlester News-Capital is rerunning some of his more memorable Ramblin' Round columns. This first published August 2019.
I ran across a friend of mine the other day and since I know him as a connoisseur of the vinyl persuasion, I asked him if he's made any recent acquisitions.
Since Josh scouts eBay, checks out thrift shops, orders online and makes more conventional purchases at stores offering recorded music, he often runs across some interesting items. Like me, he has eclectic musical tastes reaching across a variety of genres, from bluegrass and rock, to jazz, folk, soul, country and blues.
When I asked him if he'd discovered any recent treasures, he told me he'd found some classic country vinyl, mentioning an album by Jimmy Dean in particular.
The album included the song "PT-109" — about then-future President John F. Kennedy's actions when a PT boat he commanded was hit by a Japanese destroyer in World War II. Kennedy's PT boat was sliced in two in the nighttime darkness and fog in the South Pacific encounter, throwing the crew into the water.
"PT-109" relates how then-Lt. Kennedy helped rescue one of his crew, a sailor injured so badly the man couldn't swim. Jimmy Dean sings about how Kennedy held a strap in his teeth to tow the injured man, who wore a lifejacket, through shark-infested seas until they reached an uninhabited island, and were later rescued.
After relating the story, Dean delivers a partially-spoken word passage: "Now who could guess and who could possibly know that this same man named Kennedy would be the leader of the nation, be the one to take command? The PT-109 was gone, but Kennedy lived to fight again." The song concludes with the chorus:
"Smoke and fire upon the sea; Everywhere they looked was the enemy. But JFK and his crew loved on, which proves it's hard to get the best of a man named John." The song then segues into the a couple of lines from Dean's massive hit from the year before, "Big John, Big John."
Released in 1962 in the midst of Kennedy's term as the nation's 35th president, the song climbed to number 3 on the country charts and number 8 on the pop charts, making it a crossover hit while Kennedy was still in office! Can you imagine that happening today?
Josh seemed pleased with the find and I have too have a vinyl copy of the 45 rpm single I ran across somewhere. I considered the fact that I encountered Josh this week one of the cases of synchronicity which sometimes occurs, because I'd been thinking a few days prior about presidential records — not the kind that emanate from the White House, but recordings made about the nation's leaders, like "PT-109" and JFK.
One might assume there would be plenty of songs recorded about the nation's most well-known presidents, but with a few exceptions, that's not the case. So what presidents were featured in popular songs?
I could only think of a few.
The reason I'd been thinking about presidential songs is I'm currently reading Candice Miller's "The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President," her fascinating study of James Garfield, the nation's 20th president, who took office on March 4, 1881 and who was shot by assassin Charles Guiteau about four months later on July 2. Garfield lingered for weeks before he died on Sept. 19, 1881.
While Johnny Cash is known for his many timeless recordings of songs ranging from "Folsom Prison Blues" to "Sunday MorningComing Down" and beyond to his great American Recordings toward the end of his career, I've always liked some of his lesser-known ones as much as his hits.
One of them is Cash's version of Ramblin' Jack Elliott's "Mr. Garfield" — a song told from the point of view of a young man who was at the train station in Washington when Garfield was shot and who later went to the White House to try and visit him before the president succumbed to his wounds.
With the 1965 country music number one records including Connie Smith's "Once a Day", Roger Miller's "King of the Road" and Buck Owens' "I've Got a Tiger by the Tail", Cash's recording with the refrain "Mr. Garfield's been shot down, shot down shot down. Mr Garfield's been shot down low" didn't make it very far up the charts — but from the time I heard it, I've thought of it as another Cash classic.
Of course, there's Johnny Horton's recording of the Jimmy Driftwood song "The Battle of New Orleans," when a group of regular soldiers, hometown militia, Choctaw Indians, backwoodsmen, freedmen, creoles and even the pirate band of Jean Lafitte banded together to defeat Britain's finest army during the War of 1812.
Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president, was featured in the song which covers the time when he was still a colonel. He's immortalized in the song's opening lines "In 1814 we took a little trip, along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip'." Jackson's also referred to in the next verse by his nickname: "Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise, if we didn't fire our muskets till we looked 'em in the eyes."
"The Battle of New Orleans" not only hit number one on the Billboard country music charts, but topped the popular music charts as well. Billboard names it the number one song of 1959, in any genre — quite an accomplishment when America's teens were growing ever more enthralled with rock 'n' roll.
One of those rock 'n' rollers from the late 1950s and early '60s recorded one of the best presidential songs ever, "Abraham, Martin and John." Recorded by Dion in 1968 — the year that the civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. "Bobby" Kennedy were assassinated, the song joins them with assassinated Presidents Abraham Lincoln and JFK.
"Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby, can you tell me where he's gone?" Dion sings, then answers his own question.
"I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill, with Abraham, Martin and John."