Last week’s essay on academic freedom featured polarizing content, but a reader comment reminded me that there are many other forms of risk-taking in the classroom that fall under the same umbrella of academic freedom but that take more playful forms. That reader was Terry Freedman, and on his own Substack he describes three experiments that he has used to challenge his students. Terry frames these as examples of what you are *not* supposed to do as a teacher, but you might say that each of his experiments contains an element of surprise. In fiction, a similar technique introduces elements of strangeness into images, characters, or plot lines to make them more memorable. And just as a toddler can retain a memory of feeling unsafe into adulthood, moments of feeling unsettled in the classroom — disturbingly or delightfully — are often the scenes we recall most vividly later in life.
I sometimes unsettled students and myself over the years by bringing my guitar to class. There were a handful of occasions for doing this, but my favorite was teaching the elements of plot through folk ballads. Everyone knows the television formula for plot, how the opening scene introduces the kidnapping or illness or whatever that the heroes will spend the rest of the episode trying valiantly (but mostly failing) to solve. So I wanted a different angle to highlight Stephen King’s notion of situation driving a story more effectively than plot points. Some ballads unfold predictably, like television dramas, but I believe there are soulful elements in many folk songs that lift the stories they tell to a higher emotional register and that linger longer in the heart as a result. You can’t understand a ballad by its lyrics alone: every singer interprets the melody, rhythm, and mood differently. This was why I wanted to perform them for my students rather than simply distributing handouts with the words. Many ballads are unknown to young people, which gives them an extra layer of useful strangeness.
Tennessee Stud
“Tennessee Stud” captures the basic conventions of plot as well as any textbook. The tale begins with conflict: the narrator loves a girl with golden hair, but has some trouble with her father and her outlaw brother, which causes him to flee. The rising action begins as the narrator rides his Tennessee Stud away from that trouble — across the Arkansas mud and down to the Texas frontier (the year is 1825), where he wins some horse races and kills a gambler in a gunfight. Each of these incidents has clear stakes, and survival might have resolved the core conflict for another young man. But our narrator grows so lonesome for his love back in Tennessee that he retraces his steps to find her. We learn of a subplot here: the girl with the golden hair rides a Tennessee mare for whom the stud yearns as keenly as his rider does for his beloved. The ballad reaches its climax as the narrator whips his lover’s father and her outlaw brother, presumably liberating the girl. The falling action, or denouement, begins as they ride their horses “stirrup to stirrup and side by side” across the Big Muddy River toward the plains. And the ending shows that all four lovers have made a home there, as a pretty baby plays with a little horse colt near the cabin door.
This is an endearing song despite its archaic gender conventions, and it ties up the conflict of forbidden love in a satisfying bow. But the song might be less iconic if it did not incorporate some elements of surprise. The chorus hammers home the deepest love of all: that of the rider for his horse.
The Tennessee Stud was long and lean
Color of the sun and his eyes were green
He had the nerve — he had the blood
And there never was a horse like the Tennessee Stud.
All of the characters in this tale would be flat, no more than cardboard cutouts, if it were not for this horse, who inspires such love and who also misses the Tennessee mare so fiercely at one point that his green eyes turn blue. How can we forget a horse with a heart like that? And so by the end of the story it’s not quite as simple as the boy getting his girl. A truly complex web of love holds that homestead together: human to horse, human to human, horse to horse, and (if it’s not redundant) baby to colt.
John Henry
“John Henry” introduces a clear conflict, but it also illustrates more complex elements of plot, such as foreshadowing. Harry Belafonte’s version of the song begins with this verse:
John Henry, he could hammer
He could whistle and he could sing
And he’d go up to the mountain early in the morning
Just to hear his hammer ring, Lord, Lord
Just to hear his hammer ring
But John Henry also knows, from the time he was a baby “bouncing on his daddy’s knee,” that the work he loves will also be the death of him. We carry this knowledge into his confrontation with the Captain at the mine, who claims he doesn’t need John Henry’s services because he’s purchased a steam drill. This showdown is quite complex, because John Henry’s family needs his earnings (this is why he came to the mine) and because the steam drill poses a larger existential threat. The song doesn’t say this explicitly, but there is also a racial subtext to this exchange, as the real John Henry was Black. My favorite moment is John Henry’s reply to the Captain:
Well a man ain’t nothin’ but a man
Before I’d let your steam drill beat me down
I’d die with my hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord
I’d die with my hammer in my hand
The plot reaches real depth here because it taps into an inner conflict, John Henry’s inability to sacrifice his pride. Lisa Cron explains in Story Genius that our brains are wired to respond more powerfully to narratives that push an inner conflict forward than to stories that rely solely on external action. This is also what Stephen King means by situation. When Paul Sheldon, of Misery, finds himself imprisoned by a psychotic fan who insists that he rewrite one of his books and even chops off one of his feet to prevent his escape, Sheldon has to marshal all of his resources to survive and is so traumatized by the end that he nearly loses his ability to write. Similarly, John Henry faces a predicament that he cannot turn away from, even though he knows it means his death. The song illustrates how masterful foreshadowing works: we know that John Henry will die and even how he will die, but the climax reveals another layer: why he cannot escape this fate. If he did, he would no longer be a man, at least not in his own eyes.
The song endures, in part, because John Henry triumphs, hammering out fifteen feet to the steam drill’s nine. This victory seals John Henry’s immortality. He is buried at the White House, where every passing locomotive bears witness that he was a steel-drivin’ man. This ending resonates more deeply than the closing lines of “Tennessee Stud” because we must resolve much of its dissonance within ourselves. Not only do we grieve John Henry’s death, we grieve the death of the era that he represents, before men were replaced by machines. We know that even though the steam drill represents the future, technology cannot replace humanity. And we hear echoes of that fear in our own time, when AI poses much the same threat to us that industrial machines have, historically, and still do through automation. But there is also the suggestion that a balance between people and machines might be possible, since the passing trains pay tribute not to the inventor of the steam drill, but to the steel-drivin’ man. John Henry’s ballad, like most enduring stories, finishes in us and not in the last lines or on the final chord because it has so many layers and because some of its core tensions remain unresolved.
Long Black Veil
“Long Black Veil” is the most sophisticated ballad from a literary perspective because it incorporates flashbacks and suspense, as well as foreshadowing, and even includes fantastical elements. Every verse reveals something new, thickening the plot, and like John Henry’s inescapable predicament we understand that the characters are trapped just as much by inner conflict as by external events.
The first verse sets the scene and establishes the unlucky situation:
Ten years ago on a cold dark night
There was someone killed 'neath the town hall light
There were few at the scene but they all did agree
That the man who ran looked a lot like me
Rather than developing this plot further, “Long Black Veil” shifts immediately to the chorus, which raises many suspenseful questions while hinting at events yet to come:
She walks these hills in a long black veil
And she visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows and nobody sees
Nobody knows but me
Who is “she”? Why is she visiting the speaker’s grave? What happened to put the speaker six feet under? And if he’s dead, how is he telling us this tale? We learn a little more about the first three questions in the next verse.
The judge said, "Son, what's your alibi?
If you were somewhere else, then you don't have to die"
But I spoke not a word though it meant my life
'Cause I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife
Now we know who the unnamed woman is and why the speaker chose death, even though he had an alibi. We return to the chorus with a fresh pique of anguish and await the final verse with both dread and morbid fascination.
The scaffold is high, and eternity nears
She stands in the crowd and sheds not a tear
But sometimes at night when the cold winds moan
In a long black veil she cries over my bones
How haunting is that image of the woman standing in the crowd, betraying nothing, while her lover looks back at her from the scaffold? Oh, man. And the depth of her secret grief and guilt, which she releases into the cold and moaning winds, slays me every time. As with “John Henry,” we must carry away within us the unsatisfying knowledge that the speaker died to save his lover’s honor and perhaps also to protect his best friend, but that once he was falsely charged with murder there was no escape from misery, no matter what choice he might have made. The story has achieved such resonance by its end that we don’t even care that a ghost is narrating it. It’s real, by God. It’s real.
This song also illustrates how a good title can add novelty to a plot. I have long borrowed this idea from the late Susan Atefat Peckham, one of my graduate school classmates. Maybe someone taught the concept to her, but I’ll never forget Susan explaining how she wanted her poem titles to “detonate” at some strategic point in her verse. A good literary title hints at meaning that surprises us when it completes itself, the way the punch line of a joke startles us into laughter by tugging a few threads together. We have no idea why the woman is wearing a long black veil during the first chorus. We have a stronger sense of it after the second reprise, but we don’t feel the full weight of that veil until the final chorus, when we know that it’s not just grief, but also a multilayered guilt, that the veil conceals. She could have saved an innocent man and she didn’t, maybe to save herself, maybe because there were no good choices at that point. Just as “John Henry” expands into the universal, this woman’s secret pain represents hidden burdens that we all carry within us.
I have taught this lesson more than a dozen times, beginning with rudimentary definitions of plot elements and then asking students to listen for them as I performed each song. Those discussions were fresh every time, and that probably would have been true even if I’d just played the YouTube links embedded here. But I don’t think I would have felt the same rapt attention from each group if I’d not forced myself to pick up the guitar and sing. Maybe some of my students are still bearing the scars of that, but I’d wager that the experience was often more pleasurable than not and that the strangeness of it helped cement the concepts for life.
In other news, I’m pleased to announce that I’m not done with teaching quite yet. I’ll be offering a four-week online course through Writing Workshops every Tuesday from March 14 — April 4. Week One will focus on defamiliarization, the technique I describe briefly in today’s introduction. Subsequent lessons will feature urgency, nuance, and concision: all essential tools for engaging a public audience. See the course page for details about each week.
Joshua, as a teacher (of entrepreneurship & innovation) and storytelling I just LOVED this article. It reminded me in many ways the storytellers (often on religious and spiritual themes) that I grew up listening to India - incorporated explicit narration, interspersed with song, then the occasional audience call & reply loaded with much imagery and context—a true multimedia experience. The story of the Tennessee Stud and the sub-3min performance by Johnny Cash moved me enough to jot a small post on LinkedIn with a shout out to The Recovering Academic! https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ksrikrishna_johnny-cash-tennessee-stud-activity-7026896705723727874-6DGz
Thank you - keep on teaching brother!
Hi Joshua, thank you for mentioning my article. I found this very moving, and every song lyric brought a lump to my throat. I'd have loved to have been in your classroom listening to the discussions.
You've inspired me to repost a somewhat similar article about a musician called David Ackles. Obviously, I have cited this article in the uodate. Here it is, I hope you like it:
https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/updated-in-praise-of-david-ackles?sd=pf