History: He Was a Friend of Mine/The President Is Dead

The Byrds: He Was a Friend of Mine

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Okkervil River: The President Is Dead

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Wow, here we are four days into our history theme and no one's beat me to the Kennedy assassination! Here are two tracks that, taken together, say something about how one's proximity to an event can color the content of the song. The Byrds' "He Was a Friend of Mine" was released on their second album, 1965's Turn! Turn Turn! (probably their most self-important album, and the most generically "Byrds" sound, and one of my least favorites by them). The song is a traditional folk song and has been done by plenty of other singers over the years, but Roger McGuinn changed the lyrics to make Kennedy the "friend" of the title. The simple lyrics and melancholy tone of the song are reverent, and probably mirror the feelings of a lot of people in the country who actually lived through the trauma of seeing a beloved president killed.

Okkervil River's song, on the other hand, was written forty-three years after the fact, not two. Thus Will Sheff takes things in a more literary direction. He starts with the news coming over the radio, but by the second verse, when he asks "where were you when," he moves the song into a completely domestic picture, lyrically abandoning the outside world altogether until the lyrics circle back again to the news coming over the radio. The song is more interestingly written than the Byrds tune, though Kennedy is treated more as a lyrical device than an emotional trigger.