The Ballad of the Top Ten: The Ballad of Ira Hayes (#2)

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Monday to ya! (You can’t say “happy Monday” to anyone and expect anything but a scowl in return. ) Two more weeks of fa-la-la stuff left, so get that shopping done! I’ll give you some non-Christmas music to shop to, another song with “the ballad of” in the title. At least everyone has heard of today’s singer…. #2: The Ballad of Ira Hayes - Johnny Cash Nothing “merry” about this song at all. It’s a brutal account of the life of Pfc Ira Hamilton Hayes (1923-1955), a man who lives in immortality as one of the six Marines in the iconic photograph of the raising of the US flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima (which is replicated as the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington DC). Born on a reservation in Arizona, Hayes joined the Marines during World War II. He was one of five men from his platoon to survive Iwo Jima. After the photograph became world famous the surviving members in the photo (two were killed in action a few days after the photograph was taken) were brought home and made “7th War Loan” (wartime savings bonds) spokesmen. Hayes wanted to be a civilian, but he kept getting — I guess the proper term would be hounded — about the war. And, back in those days, PTSD wasn’t considered a diagnosis, let alone something to be treated for. So Hayes, like many others, suffered in silence and turned to the bottle for solace. Wikipedia says he had over fifty public intoxication arrests. And, as the song says, it eventually killed him. The song embellished things a little (Hayes died of exposure after passing out, not in “two inches of water”), but it gets the story told. And you can probably hear in Johnny Cash’s voice that he was more than a little upset over it. No wonder the Man in Black became the “man in black.” The Ballad of Ira Hayes Written by Peter LaFarge Recorded by Johnny Cash From Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, 1964 From the land of the Pima Indians: