I’m gonna tell you something, Flaca, and I want you to listen and listen tight…

The first soundtrack album I ever owned actually belonged to parents… Dmitri Tiomkin’s stirring score from THE ALAMO (1960), which also included snatches of dialogue.  (No, Quentin Tarantino didn’t invent this gimmick.)  My parents had bought that LP for the then-princely sum of $5 before I was even born and throughout my childhood I played it to death.  I still have it, with that great cover illustration showing the 13th day of glory at the siege of Alamo and Davy Crockett swinging his empty musket over his head, cracking skulls.  (Somewhere on my desk I have a blue plastic figure, no bigger than my thumb, of Crockett affecting a similar pose and that image has been throughout my entire life a bit talismanic for me… the spirit of never surrendering and of taking as many of them with you as you can before you lay it down.)   It was years before I actually saw THE ALAMO, yet I knew the legend of Davy Crockett from the Walt Disney movies and the song sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, of course.  Although I hadn’t, by the age of 3, yet killed me a bar, I felt a kinship with Davy Crockett and in his spirit tucked a knife and a hatchet into my belt for trips into the woods.  They don’t let kids play with hatchets and knives anymore and I think our nation has suffered as a result.  But anyway.

For this Independence Day I’d like to quote one of Davy Crockett’s more stirring speeches from THE ALAMO.  As played by John Wayne (who also directed), Crockett isn’t the self-effacing country boy played by Fess Parker on TV but rather one of the Duke’s trademark men of action, a laconic but quick-acting action hero with his own thoughts about service and sacrifice.  I found this speech particularly moving as a little boy and 40 years later I still do.  I memorized it once upon a time and could recite it upon request.  (There were none.)  In the spirit of the 4th of July, in the spirit of liberty and freedom, I pass it onto you…

I’m gonna tell you something, Flaca, and I want you to listen tight. May sound like I’m talking about me. But I’m not, I’m talking bout you. As a matter of fact, I’m talking about all people everywhere.

When I come down here to Texas I was looking for something. I didn’t know what. Seems like you add up my life and I spent it all stompin’ other men or, in some cases, getting’ stomped. Had me some money and had me some medals. But none of it seemed a lifetime worth the pain of the mother that bore me. It’s like I was empty.

Well, I’m not empty anymore. That’s what’s important. To feel useful in this old world. To hit a lick in against what’s wrong or to say a word for what’s right even though you get walloped for saying that word.

Now I may sound like a Bible-beater yelling up a revival at a river-crossing camp meeting… but that don’t change the truth none. There’s right and there’s wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around but you’re dead as a beaver hat.