The stories in Willie Davis’s collection I Can Outdance Jesus hold a mirror Appalachia to life in every way.
Maud Casey wrote of the book:
“Willie Davis is a blasphemous believer with as much heart as imagination and a trickster’s gift for slantwise truth-telling. I Can Outdance Jesus—populated with ruckus-raising, bullshit-calling, ghost-ravaged storytellers—is its own glorious world with roots in eastern Kentucky. ‘Anyone who speaks in my accent grew up primed for destructions,’ the book begins, on behalf of all its characters who, as Eudora Welty puts it, ‘sing true.’ Davis is writing in Welty’s lineage though there’s as much Percival Everett and Frank Stafford here as Welty, and Davis’s magnificent song is very much his own.”
In his own words, here is Willie Davis’s Book Notes music playlist for his story collection I Can Outdance Jesus:
Only one story in this book explicitly deals with music, but I think of this collection as intrinsically musical. The title “I Can Outdance Jesus” is cribbed from a folk song, and the book’s design is meant to look like the cover of an old country album. More than that, each of these stories is rooted in music. I thought of each of these stories as cuts from an album—I wanted them to have complimentary rhythms and stitch together to make something larger than the individual stories.
For a setlist, I’ll try to identify the song at the heart of each story in I Can Outdance Jesus.
“Not Everybody Likes Us” by Hank Williams III
The opening story, “Battle Hymn,” concerns a young country singer who uses music as a weapon. His goal is to write the most hateful, maddening song in history to make its listeners riot and burn down The Grand Old Opry. It’s—arguably—not the soundest strategy, but I admire anyone who has that pure an appreciation for the power of art.
Shortly after 9/11, I heard a parody of Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It” rewritten as “Hey, Bin Laden, Shove It!” I find it unbelievably funny that someone watches three thousand people burned alive and thinks, “I’ve got to tell the man behind this to shove it. In no uncertain terms.” It’s like giving the person who murdered your child the finger. I imagined Bin Laden hearing it, holding back tears, saying, “Really, man? Shove it? There’s edgy and there’s offensive, and you’ve officially crossed the line.”
This got me thinking about feud songs. Two artists who hate each other squaring up and trying to salt each other’s earth. I love feud songs, the meaner the better. I know next to nothing about Rap, but the one aspect that I think they do perfectly is feuds, beefs, rivalries. There’s something so pure about the hatred that it’s almost cleansing. I enjoy Punk Rock and all the punk shenanigans, but hearing “Hit ‘Em Up” or “No Vaseline” makes them seem like the theater kids they are.
When I was conceiving this character, I thought of him as a Battle-Rapper for Country Music. There are Country feuds, but with some exceptions, the music is sanitized. Who won the fight between Toby Keith and The Dixie Chicks? Everyone who avoided listening to the music.
I suddenly wanted to start a public feud with Hank Williams Jr. I’m largely unfamiliar with the work of Hank Jr. outside of the old intro to Monday Night Football. His public persona irritated me, and I’d guess we don’t align politically. That’s a flimsy origin for a feud, but the pettiness was the point. This character had a quick and wayward temper, and he needed no reason to make an enemy. I tried writing a song called “Bastard” about Hank Jr., where the singer becomes convinced that it’s impossible for Hank Jr. to be Hank Sr.’s actual son as the talent gap was too great. I wrote, “You are not your father’s son, there’s just no way you are/You were probably conceived the way he died, with a stranger in the back of a car.” It’s fun to revel in pointless viciousness. I was starting to believe I truly hated this man I knew nothing about.
Then I heard, “Not Everybody Likes Us” by Hank Williams III, Hank Jr.’s son. He puts his father’s balls in a blender. At the time Hank Jr. formed a very public friendship with Kid Rock, and Hank III sings, “Just so it’s known, so it’s set in stone/Kid Rock don’t come where I come from/It’s true he’s a Yank, he ain’t no son of Hank/And if you thought so, goddamn, you’re fucking dumb.” Earlier, he sings “I’m the son of a son,” in a perfect murder-suicide. My knowledge of both men stops there. Did Hank Jr. write an answer song where he talked about how Hank III pissed the bed until he was thirteen? Is it something they laugh about every Thanksgiving? I don’t know which would feel more satisfying.
That song helped me understand my character and his view of music. Sure, he wanted to start a riot, but to succeed, he had to be willing to die in the fire he created.
“A Pair of Brown Eyes” by The Pogues
The second story, “Kid In A Well”, tells the story of Frankie Clay, a recovering alcoholic and unrepentant liar. Frankie is in a barroom, telling a story of his own heroism, trying to win over a crowd of hecklers.
“A Pair of Brown Eyes” has a similar origin. Their narrator is there to drink away his sorrows, but he’d drink away whatever emotion he felt. It’s a particularly cacophonous bar, with a man in the corner singing one song, Johnny Cash on the jukebox singing another song, and people swapping stories. The man talking to the narrator recounts a story of war. “In blood and death ‘neath a screaming sky, I laid down on the ground/And the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around.” On the verge of death, he sees the brown eyes of a fellow dying soldier and thinks of the brown eyes of a lover who was not waiting when he returned home.
And how does the narrator react to such a story? “I looked at him, he looked at me, all I could do was hate him.” He was there to tell his own story of a missing, brown-eyed girl, and this guy upstages him. The gall of some people to be sadder than you. In most hands, this song could have felt like a joke, or it could have leaned too hard on the pathos or the romance. But Shane MacGowan was a giant, and no element of the song overshadows any other. My guess is he loves all these weirdos, and by the song’s end, so do I.
It’s a basic lesson that the narrator of both story and song must learn and learn again. When we tell stories, we think of ourselves. When we listen to stories, we think of ourselves. Regardless of the story, the storyteller, the truth, or the importance of what’s being said, people have no choice but to live in their heads.
“The Last Song I Will Write” by Jason Isbell
The narrator of the third story, “Last Words,” writes prospective suicide notes for all his friends. This is a bit of self-parody because in my day job I’m a teacher. My students often write really harrowing stories of genuine heartbreak. When I read them, all I think is, “Comma splice. Sentence fragment. That’s such a clichéd way to react to getting AIDS.” I thought the ultimate extension of this would be someone who critiques and rewrites suicide notes.
I was talking with some writers who wanted to compile a collection of stories based on songs by The Drive-By Truckers. I love that band, and despite the lack of an invite or an idea, I decided I wanted to be part of that number. A few days later I was listening to “The Last Song I Will Write” by Jason Isbell. He used to be part of The Drive-By Truckers, so I figured, close enough. The song is serious and elegiac, and the story is jokey and casual, but I knew there was something about the song I wanted to keep in the story.
During one chorus, Isbell sings “These are the last words I will write.” I listened to that again and again, and finally, the story clicked in my mind. To my interpretation, the song isn’t about suicide, but it is about endings. I wanted this jokey story about two friends to have the seed of sadness in it. Their lives weren’t ending, but their youths were. There’s an end to our idle afternoons. This story is about the unpleasant realization that you’re fully responsible for yourself. That realization shouldn’t drive you to suicide, but it should make you fix your grammar.
“Wrecking Ball” by Gillian Welch
“A Family of Women” is narrated by Jesse Dunaway, an Appalachian expatriate who has returned home for a summer. His father, a musician, has set him up with a local singer Hannah Holiday. Jesse feels uncomfortably seen in the mountains, which is why he left. This is compounded by his father taking a hand in his love life. The story explores the tension between the claustrophobia and comfort of home. In the story we meet Hannah’s mother and daughter and realize she’s navigating the same waters.
The song that best explores this tension is Gillian Welch’s “Wrecking Ball.” She recounts her life as a runaway, taking acid which showed her “colors I had never seen”, playing bass “under a pseudonym”, drinking a Jack and Coke “in the morning midst.” She sings slowly with an aching slur, and the fiddle is swirling around her voice. It’s all so gorgeous, and I want my kids to go off and do everything she talks about, and I want them to do nothing that she talks about, and those two feelings are so intertwined they don’t feel contradictory.
The refrain is “I was just a little Deadhead/Who was watching? Who was watching?” You can hear in that what you want. Is she lamenting having no one looking after her? Is she inviting an audience to come behold her and her song? I think both feelings can fit in the same chorus. We all want to be watched over, but we also want to be watched.
“Summer’s End” by John Prine
The fifth story, “A Subdivision of Heaven,” started as a meditation on John Prine. I am a Kentuckian, and—this is no doubt pretentious and possibly untrue, but I kind of believe it—Kentuckians love and understand John Prine in a way that nobody else does. Prine grew up in the outskirts of Chicago, but his family was all Kentucky diaspora, and they told him he was a Kentuckian too. He wrote the unofficial Kentucky State Anthem with his song “Paradise.”
I don’t know exactly what “Summer’s End” is about. I always assumed it’s a tender song, a nod between familiar lovers, lamenting the passage of time. The video, however, implies that the song is about addiction and a family’s struggle after a young mother’s OD. That’s not a problem exclusive to Kentucky, though God knows we have an adult-sized portion of it. There are many stories within this song, but it’s ultimately a plea to someone who isn’t there—which is, I reckon, another way of saying it’s a prayer. I can’t say for certain if I had “Summer’s End” in my head when I wrote “A Subdivision of Heaven” but as it is a man’s tribute to his runaway friend, when I revisit it now, I often hear Prine’s refrain in my imagination: “Come on home.” It has so much more voice and particularness and warmth than if he’d just said, “Come home.”
John Prine died of Covid on April 7th, 2020. I hadn’t even had time to settle in for a proper pandemic. It was a Sunday. I had three very young sleepless kids, and I thought the world was going to end. I didn’t cry when John Prine died: I wept. A world without John Prine wasn’t just unfair—I’d assumed it was impossible. He was the first concert I ever saw. He opened for Nanci Griffith—he debuted his song “Lake Marie” in Cincinnati. Even my son cried when he found out that John Prine died. Though to be fair, it may have been because I told him it was his fault.
I have many beliefs and principles, most of which change without warning. But just as I can’t change that I’m a Kentuckian, I have two rock-solid Kentucky beliefs that can never be altered. 1. I hope Christian Laettner has his asshole eaten by a particularly carnivorous tapeworm. 2. John Prine is a hero.
God bless Kentucky, God bless Christian Laettner’s tapeworm, and God bless John Prine.
“Daniel and The Sacred Harp,” by The Band
“The Devil Made Me Do It The First Time,” by Billy Joe Shaver
The concept of “The Peddlers,” the sixth story in the collection, is straightforward and arguably sophomoric. Two friends travel to neighboring towns dressed in black slacks and white button-down shirts and pretend to be incompetent Mormons. They go door to door, and pitch Mormonism as they’re taking swigs from their flasks, making dick jokes, selling faith in a way that they know will get them pepper-sprayed.
I grew up in an area where Mormonism is scarce. The few Mormons I’ve met are sweet and sincere and friendly—all traits I find unnerving. That said, I truly have nothing against Mormonism and certainly nothing against Mormon people. But Mormonism is funny. Not funny as in it’s bad or wrong. It’s funny that God can be sold like a vacuum or a set of encyclopedias.
“Daniel and The Sacred Harp” is the story of a boy who sells his soul for the ability to create music. In the hands of the master musicians of The Band, you understand why someone would make the deal for that sound. It’s told as a tragedy, but I’m willing to bet most musicians would swap their soul for music.
Billy Joe Shaver is a little more honest in his song of sin. “The devil made me do it the first time/The second time I did it on my own.” He’s bargained the devil down to where they each take about half of the blame. The song was a hit for Merle Haggard as “Black Rose,” but I’ll give the nod to Shaver’s own version both because he wrote the song and because he has my favorite joke ever on a talk show. On Norm MacDonald’s talk show, he read a joke that McDonald had written for him, addressing the camera like a newsman. “Bad news for all you e-cigarette smokers…you look fucking stupid.”
I love both of these versions of sin. The soul is something to be sold, negotiated, won, lost, fought over. That it may be pure or filthy isn’t the point—it’s the starting point to a greater adventure.
“You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” by Ronnie Spector
The seventh story of the collection, “The Winter Solstice,” has two origins. The first came when I was visiting my father for Christmas. He’d gone to bed, and I stayed up watching a basketball game. Around midnight, he reemerged in his pajamas, and told me he’d just read that tonight was the first lunar eclipse on the Winter Solstice in a thousand years. We poured ourselves a whiskey and went to behold the miracle. It was cloudy, so all we were looking at was clouds. That struck us both as hilarious.
The next day, I hiked up a mountain by myself. I imagined accidentally coming across a hibernating bear or a coiled mountain lion, and I thought of my father speaking at my funeral, saying “On the last night of my son’s life, we went to watch the first lunar eclipse on the winter solstice in a thousand years.” As I was lost on the mountain, I repeated that sentence over and over. Originally, that was the opening line of the story. At the time I started that story, I was living in an apartment in Baltimore the size of a rich woman’s closet. I was single, childless, and unattached. If I wanted to write a story about fathers and sons, I undoubtedly would think the POV character in the son role, but having that line made me think about it from the father’s point of view.
The second, sadder origin of the story came after I had a friend shoot himself in the mouth. Suicides are immensely painful for all involved, but the stranger part is that you have no place to put your anger. Who do you blame when someone who wants to die dies? It’s terrible and rage-inducing, but where does all that fury go?
About eight months after the death, I began to get spam from my dead friend. It arrived in my inbox under his name. It didn’t help that the letters said, “Willie, I’m so happy. You need to do what I did. I’m no longer hungry, no longer lonely, please do what I did.” Intellectually, I know that this is a series of ones and zeroes, and it has nothing to do with my friend. But if I imagined that this is someone intentionally mocking me from the account of my dead friend, then I finally had a place to direct all my anger. But I wasn’t only angry. I was sad and desperate, and I didn’t want to delete the emails just in case they had a hint of the supernatural to them. I spent a decent amount of every evening staring at my computer and crying in my tiny apartment in full view of the other apartments. There’s a character in this story who suffers from the same affliction.
“You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” started life as a punk song by Johnny Thunders. I love it, but in a relatively young man’s voice, the depression sounds like bragging. Like he’s saying, “See how sad I am? Sadder than you are.” The punk pose undercuts how precisely the song is written.
Thunders plays guitar on Ronnie Spector’s version. Spector talked about how she played a show at a gay club in New York and saw Johnny Thunders weeping in the front row. In her voice, the punk sound becomes fatter, realer. It’s no longer a meditation on sadness but an immensely sad song. She has such gravity in her voice. She had it as a young woman, singing “Be My Baby,” giving generations of boys their first dirty thoughts. She had it as an older woman, making us understand the chasm between a hug and the memory of a hug.
The sad part is the truth. We live probably 85% of our lives in memory, and we love our memories, but every parent, every child, every survivor has to admit that memories are wonderful, but they leave our bodies cold. That brief time when we’re all together, that’s when we’re at our best. What’s sadder than the sad part is what comes after. “Don’t try.” She’s warning us against doing what we will always do. The tragedy isn’t the memory that’s gone. The tragedy is we’re sacrificing our present by refusing to let it stay memory.
“Take Good Care of Yourself” by Chris Darrow
The penultimate story, “The Alaska Scam,” involves two friends on a mission to find the mysterious tagger “Nightwolf.” The narrator is convinced that Nightwolf is his runaway brother. This story and these characters lived on in my mind, and I eventually expanded this into my novel Nightwolf.
Nightwolf is very loosely based on Borf, a very prolific vandal in the Washington DC area in the mid 2000’s. To the best of my memory, he never hit any monuments, but any other structure in DC was fair game. It was rare that you could walk more than a block and a half without seeing his name. Sometimes there would be a funny slogan: “Sorry about your wall—Borf.” Or, on a newspaper box—“Yup, Borf writes on newspaper boxes too.” Occasionally, there’d be a stenciled face of a goofy looking kid, laughing. Eventually, he did an interview with The Washington Post where he hid his identity. They figured out who he was, but they honored their promise not to reveal his identity until he was arrested or outed himself. The police caught him in mid-tag, and the article came out. In many people’s mind, learning his identity sapped the magic from him. He wasn’t mysterious or dangerous or funny. He was a rich kid, a private school art student who said things like “Age is a social construct” without irony. To me, the telling story was the face. Not his face—I know his name but not what he looks like—but the stenciled face associated with Borf was his friend who killed himself at sixteen.
Borf felt smaller, but to me, he felt more human as well. Maybe he was a rich kid, but he was also a kid who’d lost a friend. It’s easy to forget that basic rule of human decency. We aren’t opponents in life but co-authors, writing this country together in real time.
The heart of “The Alaska Scam” comes late at night, as the narrator and his friend are staking out Nightwolf. There’s a point when each night turns to morning where if you’re awake and talking, you start confessing. Our narrator, Milo Byers, is clearly in love with his friend, and she likely loves him as well, but that’s not something he can confess, not yet. Instead, he confesses his wackiest beliefs—he’s not sure if Alaska is real, he’s unclear where magicians gain their power. He wants to tell her the simple, very human, confession that he loves her and has no way of acknowledging it because that would take courage he doesn’t have.
He’s also a kid—a kid with a runaway brother and a mother dying of dementia. He believes in an unspecified miracle, and he suspects everyone else does as well. He never explains what the miracle is because, while he feels it, he can’t articulate it.
I know nothing of Chris Darrow, but when he died in 2020, this song came across my radar. It has a beautiful zydeco rhythm and an impressive melodic fiddle. In my mind, the truth of the refrain hangs over this story. “Take good care of yourself, it’s all you’ll ever own.” People say “Every day is a miracle” but that’s missing the point. Every day is a struggle with our ghosts, our cowardice, those who would vandalize our world for a joke we don’t get. That’s common. The miracle is that every sin is an opportunity to forgive. You own nothing but yourself. That we can forgive ourselves and our enemies enough to bash on to the next day is our miracle. (Maybe I can’t articulate it either. But I feel it).
“Fish and Bird” by Tom Waits
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” by Bob Dylan
When I was piecing this collection together, I thought about the stories as songs on an album. It’s similar to how a baseball manager works his lineup—you want to mix speed with power. I paid attention to how one story blended to the next, and I wanted to space out the ones that had similar narrators and themes. While I have zero confidence that I chose correctly, I was positive of two spots. “Battle Hymn” should lead off because it felt like the big, catchy single, and “Roar and Retreat” should end the book.
My favorite kinds of closing tracks are long and messy. They don’t sum up what came before but offer a new, more confusing pastiche. The best examples of these long, sloppy album closers are “Desolation Row” and “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” both by Bob Dylan. “Desolation Row” is maybe my favorite song of all time, but “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is a bizarre, unapologetic love song. “Roar and Retreat” is a bizarre, slightly apologetic love story, so I think it is a better fit.
It’s strange and sweet, and while the lyrics are abstract, the point is clear. This is a man deeply in love. He sees love through a broken-glass mirror, so the vision is distorted, but the emotion is overwhelming. The lore is that Bob Dylan went to Nashville to record one of his masterpiece albums, Blonde On Blonde, and he made all the musicians wait on him for days until he emerged for a song. He was drinking lemon tea spiked with LSD, and when he finally emerged with his song “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the studio musicians sighed and thought, “Let’s humor this junkie for the next three minutes and get through this.” The song was fourteen minutes long, and they recorded it on the first take with nobody knowing what to do. Like all things associated with Bob Dylan, I love it, and I have no idea if it’s true.
“Roar and Retreat” tells the story of two couples breaking into an empty house on the ocean to have a secret weekend getaway. All four characters love their romantic partners, but they also seem to love the other three people just as much. That love takes the form of envy, and they each change themselves throughout the weekend, trying to become more like the others. Envy is at the heart of many loves, not just romantic love, as is the desire to change. But there is a limit to what we can change. Wanting to become someone new for love is noble and deeply felt, but it’s also useless because it’s impossible. Sometimes the purest love is impossible love. There’s no second step, no honest action you can take to realize the love. You just feel it and feel useless in the face of it.
Tom Waits wrote “Fish and Bird” as part of his play Alice, a musical examination of the relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the child Carroll immortalized in Alice In Wonderland. There has been a century of speculation about the exact nature of their relationship. Carroll often befriended little girls and seemed to lose interest in them as they aged. He was friends with Alice’s sisters, but he was especially close to Alice. He photographed her, and while there’s nothing inherently scandalous about the pictures, Vladimir Nabokov said the photographer had an affinity with the narrator of Lolita. No one ever made a public accusation against Carroll, including Liddel, who lived a long and public life. There is no evidence to think his relationship with her was inappropriate and some evidence to suggest he liked adult women and befriended children as a means to court their governesses. But if someone keeps introducing 10-year-old girls as his friends, then I at least take notice.
Waits speculates that Carroll loved Alice, but he understood his love to be corrosive. He knew acting on it would ruin both of their lives. So he transmogrified his love into Wonderland, a world that never will be. All the impossibilities of Wonderland were permutations of his unspoken and unacted desire. Trapped in his imagination, they turn magical, whimsical, maybe scary but ultimately harmless.
The vision comes to a head with “Fish and Bird.” A drunken sailor tells the barroom a tale of “a little bird who fell in love with a whale.” The sadness is set up from the beginning, and it never develops. They recognize their love was blocked by one immutable fact. “He said ‘You cannot live in the ocean,’ and she said to him ‘You never can live in the sky.’” The affection is moving—and given the metaphor at the tale’s heart, a little disturbing—but it doesn’t bridge the distance between the ocean and the sky. They work out a sly compromise. When the moon is bright and the water is clear, the bird can see his reflection in the water and imagine herself an aquatic animal. The whale can see himself in the moon, and imagine he is in the sky with the bird. The song ends by saying, “Though I know that we both must part, you can live in my heart.”
The heart is crucial to everything, but it’s perhaps overpraised when it comes to love. Love lives most vibrantly in our imaginations. And of course, some loves need to stay in the imagination. But the notion that impossible love—even bad love—can be transformed into realms as vast as the ocean feels true. Love, like music and tall tales, is an act of creation.
Willie Davis’s fiction has appeared in The Guardian, The Kenyon Review, At Length, and The Berkeley Fiction Review among several other places. He is the winner of the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize (judged by Zadie Smith) and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize (judged by Amy Hempel). He received a scholarship from The Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Fellowship from The Kentucky Arts Council.
A native of Whitesburg, Kentucky, Willie earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and The University of Maryland. He worked as a reader for a small literary agency, an assistant for The Writers Center, as well as a brief, torturous stint as the chapter coordinator of the DC Writers Union.
He has taught English and Creative Writing at The University of Maryland, Kentucky State University, Georgetown College, and The Carnegie Center.