This song came out as a single the same year as "She Thinks I Still Care," which alone would make Jones a genius singer in the way he makes the line about dialing his ex-lover's number "by mis-taaaaake today..." sound both hilarious and like you and he each lost a kidney. "Open Pit Mine," in contrast, is a murder ballad like no other, although in its outline it is like almost all others: the singer’s wife cheats, so he kills her and her lover together. And the Arizona copper mine of the title is a metaphor like a sack of doorknobs is: he makes the money he gives her for pleasure by working "like a slave" there; he runs to it after his crime; he has been digging his grave in it all along. But the shocking dispassion of Jones' performance makes the comparatively studied solemnity of Johnny Cash's own genuinely great moments sound utterly cornball. Neither sad resignation nor grief: just barely articulable horrified surprise. In contrast, for Bruce Springsteen to have Charlie Starkweather say that "there's just a meanness in this world" in “Nebraska” is just Bruce’s admission that his performance alone cannot do the math for us.
Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
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