Joe: The man who said he was going to kill his woman and then go to Mexico

A man is walking down the street with a gun in his hand and someone stops him to ask where he is going. Joe answers calmly that he is going to kill his woman, whom he has caught with another man. In the next verse, the questioner has already heard that he has done it, and Joe confirms it; at the end, he says he is heading south, to Mexico, where he will be free and where no hangman can reach him. That is how “Hey Joe”, one of the most covered songs in rock history, is built: as a conversation in which nobody is shocked. Billy Roberts registered it under his name in 1962, although its authorship has been disputed; The Leaves made it a hit in the United States in 1966, and in December of that year The Jimi Hendrix Experience released it as their first single, which reached number 6 in the UK.

// The theoryWhen violence is an obligation

In The Subculture of Violence (1967), the criminologist Marvin Wolfgang and the psychiatrist Franco Ferracuti argued that in some social groups there is a value system that favors violence. In those subcultures, certain situations, an insult, an affront to honor or a partner’s infidelity, not only permit a violent response but demand it. Whoever fails to respond is exposed to contempt and loss of status. Wolfgang had earlier studied homicides in Philadelphia and observed that many arose from apparently trivial disputes in which what was at stake was honor.

// The subjectA man on the run

Joe has no history or face. We know only that he has a gun, that he has killed his woman and that he is on the run. That vagueness is part of the song’s force, lending itself to every reading: the wronged man, the Western outlaw, the rebel. Hendrix’s version, slow, dark and with a guitar that sounds like a lament, gave it an almost mythical dimension. But beneath the myth lies a very concrete story: a man who kills his partner because he considers her his and flees so as not to pay for it.

The song has ancestors that tell the same story. The models attributed to Roberts include “Little Sadie”, a traditional ballad from the early twentieth century about a man on the run after shooting his wife, and the “Hey Joe!” that Carl Smith took up the country charts in 1953, from which he borrowed the title and the question-and-answer format. From the first it inherits the crime; from the second, the chatty tone. The Los Angeles bands that recorded it in 1965 and 1966 made it a garage rock classic, and in the versions by Love and the Byrds Joe is not even carrying a gun, but money. Hendrix had made it his own in New York, at a slow tempo inspired by Tim Rose’s version, which he heard on a jukebox, and in August 1969 it was the last song he played at Woodstock: the crowd that had not yet left called for an encore, and the festival closed with it. The killing of a woman ended up sounding like a generation’s farewell, and the question put by the man who meets Joe is still not the one anyone would ask: not why, but where to.

// The crackHonour or control

Wolfgang and Ferracuti’s theory was criticized for its bias: it was applied mainly to poor neighborhoods and minorities, and it contributed to the idea that certain groups are violent by culture. Later research found that approval of violence is not much greater among the poor than among other groups, and that the difference in homicide rates is better explained by concentrated poverty and the absence of institutions.

Feminist criminology adds another objection. Speaking of offended honor in a case like Joe’s reproduces the aggressor’s language. What the song describes is a femicide over separation, the same pattern as Don José’s in Carmen, and the code of honor is its justification, not its cause.