The strange connection between the Grateful Dead and ‘There Will Be Blood’
‘Ramble On Rose’ is one of the most beloved songs in the entire Grateful Dead canon. A classic Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia composition that first appeared on the legendary live album Europe 72, ‘Ramble On Rose’ is perhaps the jauntiest and silliest song that the pair ever produced. Filled with wild characters and cheeky wordplay, ‘Ramble On Rose’ contains that strange spark that the best Dead songs have. The more you parse through its strange setting, the more engrossing it gets.
One of the bizarre people that pops up in Hunter’s alternative tableaux of America is Billy Sunday. All that we get from the song is that Sunday appears in a “shotgun ragtime band”, favouring the old-timey imagery that Hunter excelled at. But just like the decidedly British characters like Jack the Ripper and Mary Shelly, along with the American-as-apple-pie Wolfman Jack, Billy Sunday isn’t a whimsical creation from Hunter’s mind.
Born just outside Ames, Iowa, William Ashley Sunday grew up to play for a decade in American professional baseball during the 1880s. Sunday even managed to win two National League pennants with the Chicago White Stockings when that was the highest achievement in the sport (the National and American Leagues wouldn’t host the first world series until 1903). Sunday was a solid player but didn’t hit well enough to be a superstar. This was before Major League Baseball became a major sports draw as well, leaving Sunday to look for alternative work after his athletic days were over.
Toward the end of his baseball career, Sunday converted to Christianity. He attended a number of services before retiring, and once baseball was firmly in the rearview mirror, Sunday decided to become an evangelical preacher. His style took after the fire and brimstone evangelists, right down to the emphatic commitment to faith. One of his most famous sermons might be familiar to some movie fans.
“I am against sin,” Sunday famously preached. “I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll butt it as long as I’ve got a head, and I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m old, fistless, footless, and toothless, I’ll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition.”
Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson will likely recognise that passage as an almost word-for-word sermon that Paul Dano’s Eli speaks in the film There Will Be Blood. The connection is made explicit by both of Dano’s characters, Paul and Eli, sharing the same last name as Billy: Sunday. So next time you’re playing six degrees of separation, make sure you keep Robert Hunter’s lyrics in mind: ‘Ramble On Rose’ has an entire cast of connections to the real world and beyond.
