Same Words, Different Sheriff

May 19, 2008

My discovery of the week has been the difference between two version of "I Shot the Sheriff." The first version is the original one by Bob Marley and the second is the cover by Eric Clapton which went to #1 in 1974. It is fun to see an example of two artists using the same words but yet those words meaning something completely different.

Here is Bob Marley performing the song in concert:

Even the verbal inflections betray its rootedness in Rastafari beliefs and values: "they're trying to track I down".. using "I" to displace the objective case "me." By means of a broadly painted story of Sheriff John Brown's attempt to keep a man in his place, Marley communicates key concepts of Rastafari faith: direct oppression on the part of Babylon (through the police), the justification of rebellion against oppression, and the sure decline of the system ("one day the bottom a-go drop out.."). In its ambiguities and faux western setting the song owes much to the work of Bob Dylan on John Wesley Harding, but the message of "I Shot the Sheriff" is distinctively.. unmistakably.. Rastafari.

The Eric Clapton version—as it is represented in the following music video—manages to completely ignore the Rastafari content of the lyrics.

We see an early video featuring a kid who has a cap gun and is watching old westerns on TV. The Old West placement of the song, as hinted at by "sheriff" and "getting out of town," are played up and literalized. The figure Sheriff John Brown becomes an animated comic strip.. making him not an oppressor but a standard fake "bad guy." When the mom opens the bedroom door at the end the game is up and it all looks silly, that shooting and controversy.

I won't use this as a chance to complain about Clapton, I just want to point out how fascinating it is that the same words can mean something so different when they meet a new historical context. It is a phenomenon that's not new, going back to the beginning of rock as white performers took over the words and music of blacks. This cultural crossover is sometimes approached as a uniquely American situation, but actually nothing is more common in the history of culture. The same factors are at play whenever a work that has an original historical meaning is applied to a different context. The Christian use of the Psalms, for example, is analogous as the original historical use of the Psalms and their political content is lost in the process of giving them spiritual meaning that could satisfy the heart of a Platonist.