Racking Up Plays: “The Fireplace Poker” by Drive-By Truckers

These are the posts where I gush about some song that I’ve got a huge crush on at the moment, and you put up with it and listen because you’re a good friend.

“The Fireplace Poker,” Drive-By Truckers

Drive-By Truckers’ ninth studio album, Go-Go Boots, has been out for almost four months now, but this 8-minute murder ballad has been slowly burrowing its way into my top songs, like an errant ember burning a hole clean through the carpet.

Once again putting his talent for sordid storytelling and his knowledgeable Northern Alabama roots to good use, Patterson Hood—still the core of the Athens, Georgia, band’s considerable songwriting muscle—finally indulged in an exploration of a hometown crime that has fascinated him for decades. In 1988, Elizabeth Sennett—wife of the Rev. Charles Sennett of Westside Church of Christ in Sheffield, Alabama—died after being brutally beaten and stabbed in their home. Once it was revealed that the minister had a mistress on the side, mounting debts and a large insurance policy on his wife, police suspected him of hiring men to carry out the murder. Within a week, he was dead, too. Officials declared it a suicide, but in Hood’s fictionalized version, he hints there may have been more to the whole wretched affair.

In a video interview, Hood explained his interest in the case:

“I (am) really fascinated by it when people in positions of authority—whether it’s a preacher or a policeman, people who are supposed to be standing up for the morally upright end of things—commit horrific crimes. It’s always been a fascinating thing to me, you know, much more so than some thug with a criminal record commiting a crime.  … I’ve got an unfinished book and an unfinished screenplay abot this exact same murder, and I wrote several versions of the song that became ‘The Fireplace Poker.’ I think the first version I wrote as far back as the late ’80s even. …

“In another life, I might have been one of those people that write noir books or directed noir movies, but instead I play in a noir band.”

The album’s title track also concerns the crime, focusing on the mistress, but it’s really just setting the scene for “The Fireplace Poker.” Over a slow, trudging riff—the type of tuned-down, southern-rock throwback that is Drive-By Truckers’ stock-in-trade—Hood recounts the grisly details with an almost dispassionate detachment. Some reviewers—cough, Pitchfork, cough—have found that approach comes off as somewhat nihilistic. I think it makes things all the more agonizing when Hood lets his bewilderment show, crying out about how the hit men—one of whom Hood claims he knew from high school—“went out the very next night AND BRAGGED ABOUT IT.”

Hey, it’s noir. If you want an an uplifting, idealistic view of human nature, maybe you’d be better off listening to “We Are the World.”