“Almost everything I knew of Billy the Kid was wrong.”
Me too. Billy Joel’s song “The Ballad of Billy the Kid” straightened me out though. :-p
A song which is inaccurate in almost every way.
The song is Joel’s fictionalized version of the story of Billy the Kid. In an interview from 1975, Joel admitted, “Basically [the song] was an experiment with an impressionist type of lyric. It was historically totally inaccurate as a story.”[2]
Examples of these inaccuracies include when Joel sings that Billy the Kid was “from a town known as Wheeling, West Virginia” and that “he robbed his way from Utah to Oklahoma.”[3] But the real Billy the Kid never robbed a bank and although his birthplace is uncertain, no account suggests that he was from West Virginia. The song also says that Billy the Kid was captured and hanged, with many people attending the hanging while in reality, he was shot and killed by Pat Garrett.