Dear Lost Reader,

This is an attempt to answer that pesky question--"What the hell was anybody thinking with those songs at the end of Deadwood?" David Milch, Deadwoods Creator, his wife Rita, and I go all the way back to college. Rita and I were fulltime aliens and David was a professor of Creative Writing. He has always been a man wildly long on brains and talent, and quite short on predictability. He once remarked to his wife Rita that she and I really knew how to "throw the bear some meat". Out of Dave that's a high compliment, and this music was our attempt at throwing his Deadwood bear a bone. The music started when Rita asked me to research real-life historical Deadwood characters for the first season, just in case David ran dry. David, it turned out, had several small nasty Darwinian gold rush towns worth of rich characters already in his head and needed none of my assistance. I am a former journalist and research dog and not a little nuts in my own right. So I went off on a self-appointed tangent after running into a musical reference in the reading. I knew Deadwood was going to be original and unique with deep dramatic layers, and that the usual slick stupid "faux" spaghetti western stuff just would not cut it. I first looked for music at the Library of Congress and branched out from there. I started sending Rita MP3's and downloads of different kinds of music to see what she and David liked. Getting Dave's attention is no small matter. He really lives with all those characters he writes in his head and it gets pretty crowded. Rita has quite an ear in her own right. She is an artist and Emmy Award winning documentary producer. Our agreement was that all she had to tell me was that her glove compartment was full and I would knock off my obsessive behavior.

Deadwood is set in the late 1870's, before recorded music or even widespread sheet music. The period was preceded by Civil War songs and Marches; Ragtime came after with something called Cakewalk (syncopated Sousa) in between. But the period itself was a bit of a black hole for American Music which gave us license to play. The railroads were in, the country was approaching record levels of immigration, and people were on the move after the war. To me that meant folk music, blues, bluegrass, country, spirituals, hymns, and eccentrics, were all game. Rita and I had no actual jobs, mind you, unless you consider "throwing the bear a bone" something suitable for a mortgage application, but we just kept going. Rita snuck the rough-cuts of the episodes from the first season out in a shopping bag and sent them to me in New York. The Deadwood shows were and are fabulous. I had already constipated my computer with songs anticipating it's arrival, and what the show would be like, but each episode seemed to pick its own song. When we finally got David to listen, he was exhausted from shooting and it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but he defied and exceeded every expectation. He sat on my bed in New York like he was at the dentist, with his fists closed and his eyes squeezed shut, wondering how he was going to tell his old friend and his wife that their effort belonged in the dumpster. Then the strangest thing happened--he found himself warming to the music, so he took it back to L.A., and even more bizarre--HBO liked it too.  So our tunes were squeezed in at the end just before each episode was "locked" to broadcast.

If you are waiting for rhyme or reason on the choices, stop reading here. To steal a line from a movie, "talking about music is like dancing about architecture." There is so much going on in each episode of Deadwood, on so many levels, so every song got chosen for different reasons. The only common ground was that David, Rita and I all seemed to go for imperfect music.  "Twisted Little Man" just plain suited Swearingen, "God and Man" rode in on a larger theme about God hiding when Man goes looking for him. My favorite part of that song is the last line about God--"How big is his teeth?" Jelly Roll Morton foreshadowed government imposing itself as an unwanted intrusion in Deadwood's future.  June Carter Cash's voice is just raw and moving, she slid in the episode where Trixie tried suicide and "Will the Circle be Unbroken" just matched her characters resigned deadened face. All three of us ended up with the same favorite, Michael Hurley's "Hog of the Forsaken", that one was a lucky find after David rejected the first round. It fit the episode where yet another body is thrown to Wu's pig, and the last sound is that of the contented pig chomping. I looked for Biblical references after I found the song, and realized this wonderful nut-bag guy had just made it up himself...a Deadwood kind of guy. 

I'm happy to report that Rita and I are official now and we are in the thick of Season 2. I listen to hours and days of music searching for a sound, a lyric--something that just fits the show. I watch each episode over and over--this year's are even better--and each one is so densely packed.  I go mood or theme or character surfing for songs that fit. Rita fields what I send her and finds her own songs too. David makes the final picks, but I keep bombarding them with choices until I think we really have it, and somehow it all gets chosen. What is funny to me in all this is that I really was a serious television journalist who has never been able to play more than a dashboard. I am in awe of the artists' musical talent, even more so because all I have is an ear.  I always loved music, but after one of my sisters made fun of me for rocking out to Jerry Lee Lewis in the basement, I thought it was a quality better kept to myself. It tickles me blind that Rita and I are able to do something together, and that we really did end up throwing David's Deadwood bear that now echoing bone.

Your Faithful Music Supervisor (Deadwood), Jane Wallace