This year marks a century since the first known recording of the classic blues standard “The Ballad of Railroad Bill.” The song is a kind of recurring theme in the history of American Music, having been recorded by everyone from Taj Mahal to Bob Dylan to Van Morrison.
But the song’s roots lie buried — literally — right here in Northwest Florida. Railroad Bill was an actual person, a black turpentine worker turned desperado named Morris Slater, who rose to infamy in the late 19th century and is buried in Pensacola’s St. John Cemetery.
His daring train robberies, generosity to poor black families and refusal to submit to white authorities would transform him into an enduring African American folk hero and one of the best-known examples of the “Bad Man” archetype.
Dennis Winston is a literary scholar and hip-hop historian. His dissertation traced the evolution of the Bad Man from African trickster folklore, to the Blues, to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s all the way to contemporary hip hop.
"These bad men ballads really start emerging in the late 19th century," Winston said. "Reconstruction is this moment when there is some bit of optimism among Black folks. There is a chance to take part in the political system. There are all of these sort of options available to them after slavery ... And, on the other side of that, you also have a society that's very hostile to this new sort of freedom that's emerging ... So we see a rise in terrorism among these individuals. We also see laws that are created to sort of re-institutionalize slavery ... So these ballads are really about these men who are challenging these ideas at this really sort of pivotal time in American history."
In many ways, Railroad Bill’s life does seem pulled straight from a rap album. He was a cop killer, who became public enemy No. 1 before he himself was killed in 1896 and laid to rest in an unmarked grave. It wasn't until 2012 that an amateur historian finally identified that grave’s location and a tombstone was erected. Though the man died, his legend lived on, and its influence can still be felt today.
"The bad man ... is this figure who's always sort of been there," Winston said, "He evolves over time ... By the 1970s, you could find traces of the Bad Man in songs like 'The Message,' by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, when he raps, "Don't push me, I'm close to the edge. I just might lose my head. I mean, even that sense of just being on the edge of sanity, because so much of the world is in chaos around him, is just sort of the underpinnings of what makes the bad man the bad man."
By the 1980s, those underpinnings had become overtones with the birth of so-called "gangsta" rap.
"Ice T would be considered one of the first gangsta rappers," said Quincy Hull, a poet whose work focuses on themes of police brutality. "... All of his raps have always been very politically charged. If you go back to just 1992, he did a song called 'Cop Killer,' which caused a storm in this whole country. Cops were killing us left and right, but here's a Black man who wrote a song about being a cop killer himself because of all the injustice that the cops were doing to us that he basically said, 'I can't take it anymore.'"
Hull, who goes by "Q," grew up in Gary, Indiana, which he described as "a war zone."
"I was losing friends," he said, "and I was writing poems to kind of help make sense of it, I guess, for myself as well as trying to pass on positive words to parents and loved ones, to people who I was losing, to try to help uplift them and make them feel better."
Hull left Gary after his brother, also a poet and emcee, was murdered in 1992. He traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, and, from there, made his way eventually to Pensacola. He arrived there in October of 2009, just one week after 17-year-old Victor Steenhad been run over by a Pensacola police officer who fired a taser at Steen from his moving patrol car, while Steen rode his bike.
The teen's death set off a series of marches over allegations of racial profiling, recklessness, and police brutality. Many of those who positioned themselves at the front of those marches were white, suburban teens who had witnessed Steen’s death from a music venue across the street. Hull said some of these organizers tried to sideline black voices when they called for more aggressive forms of protest.
"I won't call it a movement," Hull said. "It was the lack of movement that they had in Pensacola after Victor Steen’s tragic killing. And a lot of those kids were the ones who was across the street at the club that witnessed the murder. They witnessed it, they saw it. But during ... the coroner's inquest, a lot of them seemed to be very unsure about what they saw."
That inquest ultimately determined the death "an unfortunate accident," and the officer was allowed to return to work after just two weeks ’ suspension.
For Winston, it’s situations like this one that sustain the Bad Man.
"Hip hop gives many individuals an opportunity to voice their concerns when there aren't any other opportunities to do so," he said. "There isn't a political space for many young Black folks to voice their concerns. In schools, for example, a lot of that frustration isn't invited into the classroom as much as it was. We have the banning of books. We have teachers being asked to not talk about certain things in classrooms. So hip hop again becomes really one of these spaces, one of the few spaces where these types of expressions can be shared."
To silence the bad man, Hull said, is to miss the point.
"The best thing to do is to let these words come out," he said, "because the minute I stop speaking, that's when it's really going to be some trouble ... America's always been wrong, so they have created the Bad Man ... And they've created Black angst and white guilt. They've created all of that. Unfortunately, they only want to deal with Black angst and the Bad Man. They don't want to deal with the white guilt."
