Here is another essay I wrote as an example for my students some time ago. It included for reference the lyrics to the song being considered in an appendix, but I’m sure anyone accessing this blog can also find the lyrics online with ease. My goal here, as always, was to show that, popular culture, or classic literature, it matters not: the type of close reading of a text you learn in a literature class can enhance your enjoyment of just about whatever you find out there to read, see, or sing.
With the passing of Joe Diffie last year in the course of the Pandemic, this essay and the song it examines take on a new poignancy of meaning. We Orthodox say of those who have passed on, “May his memory be eternal.” Given the imagery of this song, let us envision a memorial flame, and let us say with the song, “Just let it burn in memory” of all the good times this song, and others by Mr. Diffie, have given us.
Charles Oliver
Dr. Boite
ENG 1020 SA1
7 October 2008
The Diction of Joe Diffie’s “Prop Me up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die)”
Poetry, by its nature, seeks to escape cliché. Popular music, on the other hand, tends to embrace idioms, even those that have become clichés, in an attempt to craft music from the common speech: can a popular song achieve poetry, in spite of the tendency of the medium to be mired in the mundane? Some have tried; and one of the more noble efforts is the Joe Diffie song (written by several artists working together) “Prop Me up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die).” This song does not speak in clichés, but rather achieves much of its power by mining the storehouse of English clichés, idioms, and frozen phrases, only to deploy them in creative ways that transcend their original exhausted meanings.
The overall tone of the poem is one of humor achieved through paradox, its central conceit being a desire on the part of the speaker/singer to go on living his regular life even after his death. This conceit is encapsulated in the line that ends the second verse of the song: “I’ll be the life of the party even when I’m dead and gone” (11). One sees how the song employs worn-out phrases to express ideas that transcend the phrases themselves; here it is done by juxtaposing two idioms—or rather one idiom (“life of the party”) and one pleonastic frozen phrase (“dead and gone”)—with opposite meanings, so as to produce a paradox. Furthermore, the shift from figurative language to literal emphasizes the strong contrast between the two phrases at the verbal level (“life” vs. “dead”), as well as the contrast between the audacious promise made in figurative language, and the stark literal reality (all, of course, played for humor).
The song employs idioms and clichés at both the verbal (“life of the party,” 12) and conceptual level (“remember, I like blondes,” 11; cf. “gentlemen prefer blondes”). The first of these occurs in the opening verse, where the singer anticipates possible actions subsequent to his eventual decease:
Well I ain’t afraid of dyin’, it’s the thought of bein’ dead;
I wanna go on bein’ me once my eulogy’s been read.
Don’t spread my ashes out to sea; don’t lay me down to rest;
You can put my mind at ease if you fulfill my last request. (1-4)
The singer rejects two possible treatments of his physical remains, in language that makes some use of traditional frozen phrases (“out to sea,” “lay me down to rest”), but that reuses them to produce a pair of images that capture the entire gamut of traditional Western burial practices: from traditional entombment, to burial at sea, to cremation. Instead, the singer rejects them all, and proposes a more radical idea, introduced in a line (4) that fully reassures the hearers in only 15 syllables by employing traditional shorthand phrases rich with meaning.
Some of the singer’s word choices are rich with significance. The Jukebox in the chorus is drawn from the common symbolic lexicon of the country music genre. Here it serves as a sort of synecdoche for the entire lifestyle the singer wishes to continue. Other words associated with that same lifestyle, and drawn from the same lexicon, also occur in the song: neon sign, boots (implicitly cowboy boots), stiff drink (interestingly, all three occur in the second verse, marking it as a symbolic center for the song). The first of these itself becomes a symbol (as is common in this genre) for the same culture the jukebox is connected with (although via a different route: association with drink, rather than song). It forms one half of two different metaphors (one implicit) in two adjacent lines: “Just let my headstone be a neon sign. / Just let it burn in memory of all of my good times” (9-10). Here, the sign, already a traditional symbol of the beer-drinking “good life,” becomes by metaphor, first, a headstone, then, a memorial flame. The second metaphor is made possible by a play on two very closely related usages of the verb “burn.”
Such a play on the various meanings of a word occurs at least two other times in the song. First, we notice that the term “stiff drink” is a double entendre. “Stiff drink” is another frozen phrase, and one very common in country music, but also, a “stiff” is a dead man; so “stiff drink” could be read to mean both “strong drink” and “drink for a stiff.” More important is the pun in the bridge of the song:
Just make your next selection
And while you’re still in line
You can pay your last respects
One quarter at a time. (17-20).
One can easily see that the verb in the traditional phrase “to pay one’s last respects” has become the hinge upon which a powerful trope turns. The figurative paying of respects becomes a literal paying of money (it become clear at this point how often the singer plays literal and figurative meanings off each other), and this not only acts as a pun, but serves to transform the jukebox into a shrine (no doubt with the neon sign overheard serving as memorial flame), complete with a full-body relic. The image is even more audacious than the most risqué single line of the song (which, as the second line of the chorus, is repeated four times): “Lord I wanna go to heaven, but I don’t wanna go tonight.” Reading that line, one cannot help but recall Augustine’s famous cry, “Lord, give me chastity…but not yet!”
Thus, by clever use of genre conventions, frozen phrases, and idioms, the song, “Prop Me up Beside the Jukebox (If I Die)” is able to achieve a high degree of figurative power. It is a popular song that demonstrates what can be done without using any “higher” form of diction than that of the honky tonk and the blue collar men and women who gather there, stiff drinks in hands.
