Merle Haggard, Lou Reed, and Two Lost Billys
Earlier this year, I happened to be revisiting some of the classic material by Merle Haggard and Lou Reed when I was struck by the seeming interrelatedness of a pair of the artists’ respective songs: “Billy Overcame His Size”, featured on Haggard’s classic live album Okie from Muskogee (1969), and “Billy”, the closing track from Reed’s catchy, misanthropic masterpiece Sally Can’t Dance (1974). Each song concerns the death, in one sense or another, of a character named Billy who meets his fate in Vietnam. Haggard’s inspiring Billy is an unusually small young man who “never made the football team”, and whose “sergeant laughed at his skinny frame”, but who “overcame his size” and “put pride in his daddy’s eyes / when he died to save those other men” in his unit. Reed’s “Billy”, meanwhile, could hardly be more different in tone. “In high school he played football / And me, I didn’t do anything at all. / He made touchdowns while I played pool / And no one could fig...