Linkage

... so as I listen to Amy Rigby's "Beer & Kisses," a duet with this guy, I wonder who he is so I find the CD case and see that he's John Wesley Harding, that's an evocative name, but his real name is Wesley Harding Stace, what a coincidence, there's a Bob Dylan album called John Wesley Harding, and a song, how did it go, something like "John Wesley Harding / Was a friend to the poor, / He trav'led with a gun in ev'ry hand" and I seem to recall that there really was a Texas outlaw named John Wesley Hardin, spelled without a "g," a pistol-packing murderer who probably wasn't much of a friend to the poor, or anyone else for that matter, and Dylan's song, which has nothing to do with reality, goes on to tell us "'Twas down in Chaynee County / A time they talk about," and sure enough there isn't a Chaynee County in Texas, or even in Florida, which is where, after a shoot-out, the real John Wesley Hardin was arrested by Texas Ranger John Barclay Armstrong, who earned a $4,000 bounty for his troubles and used it to buy a huge ranch in south Texas where over a century later a man named Cheney (sounds like "Chaynee") gunned another man down ...

Comments

[robert]

The humorous permutations of VP Cheney's shot-heard-round-the-world are almost endless with no more than the immediate particulars - Cheney, lawyer, quail, "shot him in the face" - but I gotta hand it to you: this is a fresh angle.

[DarkoV]

Six degrees of seperation or six bullets of connection?

[Erasmus]

Love it. And did you know that Hardin, a total sociopathic killer as a young man, was never hanged, spent his time in jail writing letters to his sons telling them not to be like him, got released, hung out his shingle as a lawyer in El Paso, and got shot in the back in a bar one day by a young glory hunter?

Or something like that. True story, filtered through Erasmus's increasingly spotty memory...