Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern

8. “A Brooding and Dangerous Soul”: Deadwood's Imperfect Music

165 8 “A Brooding and Dangerous Soul” Deadwood’s Imperfect Music David Fenimore David Fenimore provocatively explores how another kind of “generic cross-fertilization ” impacts the “feeling” and meaning of Deadwood: music and especially the music that accompanies the closing credits. Unconventional choices yet thematically evocative, the songs originate in and evoke the U.S. folk traditions , from bluegrass to spirituals, establishing “a badge of authenticity that goes beyond historical accuracy.” He notes how the songs were chosen: “Much like the way the scripts were created, the process of picking Deadwood’s closers was at once more collaborative and less deliberate than the dictatorial Ford’s.” As the previous quotation suggests, Fenimore compares Deadwood’s music to songs in well-known but more conventional Westerns, finding neither the familiar strains of Ford’s use of spirituals nor, by implication, the multigenre composition that characterized the use of Tex Ritter’s traditional ballad as a leitmotif throughout High Noon. Rather, he argues that the music articulates and reinforces some of the series’ post-Western themes: “Country blues easily generalizes into an evocation of folk experience running at an acute angle to the master narrative of Caucasian culture and commerce, transmitting a complex of ideas and historical associations relative to poverty, disenfranchisement, displacement, exploitation, and violence. It is musical shorthand for marginality .”While he demonstrates how songs, “considered individually, . . . in some way provide commentary on the surface narrative of the episode they conclude,” his most deft analysis is of the “collaborative effect” of the closing songs, which “function as a simulated resolution for [the] episode,” fulfilling viewers’ expectations with a “concluding aesthetic gesture, an open-ended and suggestive metanarrative, an intensification and rhythmic resolution of the show’s themes and ideologies.” If you’re expecting to find a key to all Deadwood musicology, a detailed episode-by-episode analysis of the thirty-six closing songs, stop reading right here. 166 fenimore That’s actually a loose paraphrase of a similar disclaimer by Jane Wallace, who served as music supervisor for Deadwood’s second and third seasons (and unofficially, it seems, for the first as well). In “Dear Lost Reader,” her account of the selection process for the songs that accompany each episode’s ending credit roll, she describes working with David Milch’s wife, her college buddy Rita Stern, to “throw the bear some meat” (i.e., suggest to a tired, grumpy, and preoccupied series creator and executive producer some songs that might work with each episode).1 She disavows any “rhyme or reason” for the selections, writing that, in search of likely songs, [I would] go mood or theme or character surfing. . . . Rita fields what I send her and finds her own songs too. David makes the final picks, but I keep bombarding them with choices until I think we really have it. . . . So our tunes were squeezed in at the end just before each episode was “locked” to broadcast. . . . Every song got chosen for different reasons. The only common ground was that David, Rita and I all seemed to go for imperfect music. Imperfect much of the music may be, in the sense of not slick, not popular, and not highly produced. The tropes of “westernness” are not invoked. This is not your grandparents’ television theme music. No singing cowboys, no Nashville “country and western,” and no European classical Ennio Morriconish or Coplandesque Music of Wide Open Spaces—in other words, no triumphal French horn calls, wood block clip-clops, or orchestrated folksongs, what Wallace calls “the usual slick stupid ‘faux’ spaghetti western stuff.” Deadwood ’s closers are drawn instead from the spirit or the fact of genuine U.S. roots music, dominated by acoustic stringed instruments, genuinely or deliberately artless solo singing, and raw emotional immediacy. I suggest that there is, in fact, some reason and a lot of rhyme to the selection of these thirty-six songs. Besides functioning as a predictable element in Deadwood’s grand design, the songs serve as a badge of authenticity that goes beyond historical accuracy. They operate at a number of levels to signal the show’s complex and “A Brooding and Dangerous Soul” 167 sometimes problematic attitudes toward class, community, and especially race. These patterns are worth discussing if only because the power of music, especially song, can be vast yet subliminal and thus easy to overlook. In several cases, as I try to show...