The insurmountable distance between the coast of California and the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming as it relates to ghosts
I'm (re)writing a book about ghosts. I am a big ghost-head and Ghost-head just generally speaking. Loooove a story about a ghost. Love a SONG about a ghost. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner sits on my Halloween playlists, not Werewolves of London, and that's how it should be.
I also really enjoy the music and madness of Garth Brooks, and today I'm going to infodump about a Garth Brooks song.
Having grown up in Oklahoma, Garth Brooks is probably no less aware of Wyoming's landlocked status than I (a Mississippi boy) am and always have been of Kentucky's similar situation with regard to the ocean. You can use a waterfront image on Google all you like, Kentucky, but I know that's a river. You aren't fooling anybody. Kentucky is landlocked. Wyoming is landlocked. This is known.
There's no oceanfront views in Kentucky and there's no beaches in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And unlike any contemporary criticisms I heard of Garth Brooks's 1995 song The Beaches of Cheyenne, I have even more to say than 'But there are no beaches there.' This is also inspired by my having found that the Genius page for this song is, like, super empty, which is an aberration on the Annotating Everything Unto Death Website. All it really does is clarify the inciting incident of the song, which I imagine is obvious to anyone with a passing awareness of rodeo riding either from firsthand observation in one's own culture or from the United States's soft power export of its cultural products. It also points out the parallels between the events in the song with the death of Lane Frost at Cheyenne Frontier Days some six years before the song's release. I consider the latter to be a valuable contribution, because I understand that's not universalized soft power knowledge. My parents started taking me to rodeos when I was three, the same summer Frost died, and to have that knowledge as background radiation to a cultural practice that's actively around you is not universal. Thanks, Genius, for making people even sadder than the song already might have done. But you're sleeping on the meat of analyzing this song, which is embracing the dissonance it sets up from the title on. Let's start with the first verse, which establishes in broad terms the position of the song's unnamed point of view character.
They packed up all his buckles and shipped his saddle to his dad
And by the way the house looked, she must have took it bad
The workers come on Monday to fix the door and patch the wall
They say she just went crazy the night she got the call
This is someone who knows what's going on, even if he doesn't know these people on any intimate level. He has specific knowledge of the damage done to the home and the distribution of the decedent's possessions. I could see him as a detached executor of the property, an entity interested in the purchase or sale of the property, or as a neighbor curious and motivated enough to get information from such a person. In any case, the song is physically centered at the home in or around which the narrator is telling you a ghost story. Which begins:
Well, he was up in Wyoming and drew a bull no man could ride
He promised her he'd turn out, well, it turned out that he lied
And all the dreams that they'd been livin' in the California sand
Died right there beside him in Cheyenne
Which can be reduced, for the comprehension of anyone upset about the beach situation, to:
Well, he was up in Wyoming and drew a bull no man could ride
He promised her he'd turn out, well, it turned out that he lied
And all the dreams that they'd been livin' in the California sand
Died right there beside him in Cheyenne
and
Well, he was up in Wyoming and drew a bull no man could ride
He promised her he'd turn out, well, it turned out that he lied
And all the dreams that they'd been livin' in the California sand
Died right there beside him in Cheyenne
The song The Beaches of Cheyenne, let me be clear, does not take place in Cheyenne. The song and the singer and the house and the ghost are all in coastal California, it's this dead rodeo rider who's in Cheyenne. Cheyenne, which is landlocked, and which has some reputation for being arid and quite divorced from the ideas we most commonly associate with the ocean. Cheyenne has no beaches on which one might walk, ghost or not. And Brooks and company knew this when they started writing the song... as kind-of-sort-of a totally different song. Dan Roberts, a co-writer on the song, recounts the process of writing it thusly:
What we had was about a guy who was living in California, a businessman working a regular job who always wished he could rodeo. So he walks the beaches at night and thinks about Cheyenne. Garth had the guitar, he was writing the melody and singing, "Every night he walks the beaches of Cheyenne," and then Garth sings, "Every night SHE walks the beaches of Cheyenne" by mistake. We were all, "Yeah it's about a woman." So when he sang that, we started getting focused in that it's about a woman, and the story materialized out of that.
And that's a sad song in and of itself, but it's a wistful kind of sad. It's not dead young bride sad. It's the everyday sadness of regretting choices that have left you living a life you don't feel reflects the person you wished you could become, and the song illustrates that sadness and longing through distance and dissonance. This man lives a comfortable life in California with easy access to the beach, but his daydreaming heart is in Cheyenne, Wyoming with the dust. That Cheyenne has no beaches is the point. That the subject of the story within the song is stuck in California is the point. That it's a song about distance and dissonance and the regret that makes that distance so bitter is the point.
They never found her body, just her diary by the bed
It told about the fight they had and the words that she had said
When he told her he was ridin', she said, "Then I don't give a damn
If you never come back from Cheyenne"
They she just went crazy
Screamin' out his name
She ran out into the ocean
And to this day they claim
That if you go down by the water
You'll see her footprints in the sand
'Cause every night she walks the beaches
Of Cheyenne
Nobody can explain it, some say she's still alive
They've even claimed they've seen her on the shoreline late at night
'Cause if you go down by the water, you'll see her footprints in the sand
'Cause every night she walks the beaches of Cheyenne
Yes, every night she walks the beaches
Of Cheyenne
Now THAT'S a sad song. Not only is this final version way sadder, it's a classic ghost story structure with a brutal complication. By the commonly agreed upon rules of ghosts in storytelling, this ghost is doubly screwed. Not only is she forever tied to the place of her death by unresolved regrets, those same rules prevent her from ever resolving them. The person she's longing for, who she might want to make amends with, is forever separated from her. In most storytelling like this, ghosts are impressions anchored in place. Echoing words she said in a heated moment, he's never coming back from Cheyenne and she can't meet him even in death. The difference and the distance is the point.
But that's just a theory
A GAINES THEORY
