Ballad Of Forty Dollars

Hall opens this one like a man settling into a chair to tell a story he finds genuinely funny, or at least instructive. The arrangement is country-plain, all acoustic guitar and steady rhythm, nothing calling attention to itself, because the song lives entirely in the details of a narrative that builds its irony slowly and with tremendous patience. The premise — a man hired to be a pallbearer for a stranger, paid forty dollars — sounds like the setup for a joke, and in some ways it is, but Hall is too good a writer to leave it there. Over the course of the song he assembles a picture of mortality and transaction and the absurdity of the social rituals we build around death. The widow cries, the preacher speaks, the hired mourners do their work, and everyone goes home. The forty dollars is both the punchline and the point — that grief can be contracted out, that strangers will shoulder your coffin for the right price, that even the most solemn human passages have an economic dimension we prefer not to examine. Hall's voice remains cheerfully matter-of-fact throughout, which makes the darker implications land harder than they would if he played them for pathos. This is a song from the tradition of American vernacular storytelling where humor and mortality share the same breath, where a man can laugh at something and mean it seriously at the same time. You'd listen to this with someone you trust enough to find the whole thing funny and unsettling in equal measure.