“James
Dean in that mercury '49
Junior
Johnson runnin' through the woods of Caroline.”— Rock 'n' roll \singer-songwriter
Bruce Springsteen, “Cadillac Ranch,” from his LP The River (1980)
I
have just quoted from one song where Junior Johnson, who died this past week, is alluded to fleetingly but explicitly.
But the NASCAR driver inspired another tune released several years before in
which, though he is not specifically mentioned, the lyrics refer to his
against-the-odds career: “I Got a Name,” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles
Fox, which became a posthumous hit for Jim Croce.
“I
Got a Name” is the theme for the 1974 movie The Last American Hero,
based on a 1965 essay by Tom Wolfe. In its way, that piece went against the
odds, too. Johnson had long been wary about speaking to reporters about how he
got his start outrunning the law as a moonshiner in North Carolina.
But,
as Michael Lewis recounted in this November 2015 profile of Wolfe for Vanity Fair,
the novelist—at that point, still writing for editor Clay Felker—won Johnson’s
confidence and came up with a pioneering example of The New Journalism. At one
stroke, it cemented the legend of both its subject and author.
No comments:
Post a Comment