All the songs in 'Dead Outlaw' on Broadway

Saddle up and learn all about the seven-time Tony Award-nominated musical's folk rock score, which blends fact and fiction to tell the story of a touring mummy.

A failed bandit in life, a touring legend in death. Elmer McCurdy’s life, death, and afterlife is the chronicle of Dead Outlaw, a seven-time Tony Award-nominated musical with country-rock music and lyrics by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna and a book by Itamar Moses.

Careening from its Off-Broadway premiere to Broadway's Longacre Theatre, the show attracts audiences who watch mesmerized — and with pity — as McCurdy’s body is marketed, co-opted, and given numerous fabricated identities for public spectacle: train robber, exploitation film prop, dope addict, and "Thousand Year Old Mummy." As his body shriveled over six decades, his original identity got blurred in the “bally,” a term for circus-inspired deception that author Mark Svenvold uses in his 2002 book Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and After-life of an American Outlaw.

McCurdy's wild-but-true story unfolds entertainingly through Dead Outlaw's score. Covering the near-century from McCurdy's 1880 birth to his 1977 burial, the sprawling scope of Dead Outlaw, as Moses told New York Theatre Guide, is pieced together by “little connections and ripples it has to other parts of American history.” Dive into the songs and the (probable) truths they share vs. the artistic license the creators took in crafting them.

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"Opening"

With gentle guitar strings, the opening ballad introduces Elmer McCurdy as a dreamer who lazed around a campfire and stargazed. And then he utters, “Let’s go rob that fucking train,” shattering our impression of his innocence.

"Dead"

The onstage band’s rollicking opener delivers a litany of dead famous people and gleefully reminds you that you and your loved ones will join them. The booming voice of the show's Band Leader (2025 Tony Award nominee Jeb Brown) declares, “Your mama’s dead. Your daddy’s dead. And so are you!” Hey, if we must all die someday, you might as well pen a foot-stomper of a song about it.

"Normal"

Richard J. Basgall's 1989 book The Career of Elmer McCurdy, Deceased: an Historical Mystery says the Maine-born Elmer grew “unruly and rebellious” and was prone to drinking, likely as a reaction to discovering the truth about his illegitimate birth and his real mother. Basgall quotes a family friend who said the once-resentful Elmer did come around to loving his birth mother, whom he lived with after the revelation.

“Normal” takes place after these events, when he's drifted to the city of Iola, Kansas, to work as a plumber. While employed under William Root, McCurdy enters a courtship with Root’s neighbor and customer, Maggie Johnson (Tony nominee Julia Knitel). Their tender love duet promises him some normalcy as he imagines settling down.

Basgall said McCurdy and Johnson were seen together at the Electric Park amusement park and a picnic zone. When Elmer vanished from Iola, Maggie was said to have enjoyed his company and found him "always something of a mystery."

"Killed a Man in Maine"

This punk rock song launches a drunken Elmer into a wild temper tantrum in a bar. In the words of Tony nominee Andrew Durand, who plays Elmer, "I get to rip the stage apart, get all my aggression out."

It’s doubtful McCurdy was a murderer by his time in Iola. According to Svenvold’s book, McCurdy actually claimed he killed a man either in Colorado, Kentucky, or an unspecified state. Regardless, his boasting backfires and Root dismisses him, prompting Elmer to depart Iola — and Maggie.

“Dead” (reprise)

The band rolls out a “Dead” reprise as Elmer distances himself from normalcy. The lyrics wonder what it takes to live an isolated life without emotional attachments: "No hope to hang on, you wonder who to be now. You’re friendless and alone, but at least you’re really free now."

"Nobody Knows Your Name"

This song, with a “Sting-ish reggae-pop groove,” is a favorite song of Itamar Moses. Elmer reaches a turning point in his life: He can’t make his fortune, so he decides he’ll steal someone else's. The song seduces the audience with the thrilling adrenaline of crime — though Elmer and his accomplice, his army buddy Walter Schoppelrie, are comically caught before doing anything illegal.

Next thing the pair knows, they're charged with suspicion of robbery. Maybe it didn’t help that they were arrested in mud-splattered overalls over their military uniform while carrying a force screw, a door jimmy, drills, hacksaws, chisels, a nitroglycerin funnel, and gunpowder. As depicted in the show, the real McCurdy invented a story that these tools were for a new army-approved machine gun.

"Blowin' It Up”

The drum-heavy “Blowin’ It Up” is a military procedural song sung by a surprising historical guest: General Douglas MacArthur, who was in charge of McCurdy during his time in the United States Army. Svenvold found it probable that MacArthur, writer of a demolition field manual and instructor of military demolitions, taught McCurdy to use nitroglycerin.

In Dead Outlaw, a legendary train robber named Walter Jarrett takes Elmer, his former cellmate, under his wing, as Elmer’s experience with explosive nitroglycerin might help the Jarretts crack train safes. However, Elmer’s first try yielded $4,000 in silver coins — that melted and fused to the safe. His subsequent explosion attempts aren’t so lucky, either.

"Indian Train"

To regain the trust of his fellow thieves, Elmer breaks out into this barn-burner to rouse them into robbing the Katy train, which is transporting royalty money to the Osage tribe in Oklahoma. Is this his outlaw breakthrough? Nope!

As described in a newspaper, Elmer “held up the train just ahead of the money train." Of historical note, when the real McCurdy attempted to rob the Katy train’s Osage royalties, it was with a different gang than Walter Jarrett's.

"Leave Me Be"

The Band Leader alludes to an ongoing dispute over who started the shootout between McCurdy and three Oklahoma sheriffs, in which McCurdy was killed at age 30 in 1911. But from an emotional standpoint, “Leave Me Be” expresses Elmer’s desire to be left alone in peace.

"If this is the end, I only want it to be comfortable and far away from laughter and tears. Leave me where I lay, I think it’s time to leave the carnival," he sings. His last wish won’t be respected.

“A Stranger”

In this ballad, Maggie Johnson pays her respects to Elmer’s body at Joseph L. Johnson’s morgue in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Her visit appears to be invented for the show to bring Elmer’s former relationship full-circle. Maggie accepts her grief while acknowledging she never truly knew Elmer.

In Basgall’s account, a person from McCurdy’s Iola past did visit and identify him: William Root, his old employer. No family, however, claimed the corpse.

"Something From Nothing"

A boom of interest in the mythic West made McCurdy’s body ripe for capitalization. In the musical, undertaker Joseph L. Johnson (Eddie Cooper) smells a profitable opportunity as onlookers flock to see the preserved body. He props McCurdy's mummy up and decorates him with a rifle, charging visitors to see him and embellishing McCurdy’s history as a legendary outlaw — a far cry from the bumbler he was.

In Svenvold's observation, by standing up the corpse, it was a "profound moment of metamorphosis... McCurdy's body was understood differently and drastically by those who were charged with its care... the change from cadaver to curiosity was now complete."

Svenvold’s book states the Johnson Funeral Home “vehemently denies” that Johnson charged the public a nickel to view the body. The musical leaves out a claim from one visitor that one of Johnson's sons pushed Elmer around on roller skates.

"Our Dear Brother"

Two circus impresarios, the Patterson brothers, claim to be McCurdy's lost brothers to obtain the body from Johnson. The barbershop duet-style song has a sardonic, slick tone.

The real Pattersons made up a sob story that “[McCurdy's] mother was so worried and sick up there in Kansas," as attested by Johnny, the eldest son of Joseph Johnson. The musical depicts the brothers not-so-subtly bribing Joseph, which makes great visual comedy and tightens the narrative, but actual accounts complicate the truth.

A 1916 Pawhuska Capital article reported that McCurdy’s body was finally claimed on October 7, 1916, by a “brother” identified as “Aver,” accompanied by a “Wayne,” both of whom may have been hired by the Pattersons. Johnny Johnson told Basgall, "[Aver and Wayne] didn't come to us [first] because they knew they couldn't buy the body from us.”

Johnny said his father turned down other attempts to purchase McCurdy’s body and that the two visitors met with the local sheriff and county attorney beforehand to lay claim. Svenvold proposes they, similarly to the onstage Pattersons, bribed local authorities to legitimize their claim to McCurdy’s body. Soon enough, it appeared in The Great Patterson Carnival Shows.

"Somethin' 'Bout a Mummy"

A stiff can stimulate the imagination. “Somethin’ ‘Bout a Mummy” is the darkly comic thesis of the musical, illuminating how a dead body on display bring us to terms with our mortality or transport our imagination to places like the Wild West.

On one level, the song is about men seeking quick bucks from the freak show spectacle. On a deeper level, it’s about how much we, the audience, grow attached to the mummy and impose our emotions, mortal anxieties, and sympathy on it: “A human sense of wonder, you can't always control, but there's something about a mummy that really stirs the soul.”

The Pattersons eventually abandoned McCurdy, and he ended up in Louis Sonney’s touring Wax Museum of Crime. McCurdy proved to be a hit that helped Sonney recoup his investment.

"Andy Payne"

When we die, the world goes on, and sometimes we’re merely adjacent to another story. Showman Charles C. Pyle, known as a P.T. Barnum of sports, once toured McCurdy with his sideshow alongside the 1928 Trans-American Footrace from New York to Los Angeles. It’s here that the musical drifts into another man’s story, that of 20-year-old Cherokee runner Andy Payne (Trent Saunders), sweating and straining to win the $25,000 prize money that would save his family farm.

Pyle tempts Andy with an offer to be his agent for further fame. The final verses imagine Andy visiting McCurdy’s body and seeing a cautionary tale in the spectacle. As the lyrics go, “Let the mummy offer you some good advice. You pick a road and you pay a price.”

He thus rejects Pyle’s offer and decides to go live a happy life on his farm, ultimately dying surrounded by loved ones. Payne knows when to quit and still gets his folk hero song.

"Somethin' 'Bout a Mummy" (reprise)

Sonney ultimately rides the boom of exploitation films, investing his money in the ventures of filmmaker Dwain Esper (famous among cinephiles for producing Reefer Madness, a marijuana melodrama). In this duet, Sonney loans Elmer's body to Esper.

"Millicent's Song"

When Esper stashes Elmer’s corpse in his family home, it attracts the attention of Esper's daughter, Millicent (Julia Knitel). The initially flabbergasted girl, lonely and desperate for a friend, confides in McCurdy throughout the corpse’s career as a promotional prop for her father’s exploitation films.

The BBC Two documentary Timewatch: The Oklahoma Outlaw (inspired by Basgall’s book) has archival footage of McCurdy starring in the newsreel film March of Crime as a criminal “addict and peddler of drugs.” Esper fabricated the story that McCurdy’s deteriorating body was a result of “his dope-saturated tissues” and swallowing acid in an act of suicide. When Esper toured his 1933 exploitation film Narcotic under the pretense of anti-drug education, he showed off McCurdy's body in the lobby.

Basgall’s book quotes the real Millicent Esper fondly remembering that her father collected live animals in the lobby that exhibited McCurdy's body. Betty, a lioness, guarded it like part of the family. Millicent didn’t waste an opportunity to use the corpse for mischief at Halloween parties, blindfolding her guests and guiding them to Elmer's casket.

"Nobody Knows Your Name" (reprise)

“It isn’t fair.” The spirit of Elmer McCurdy sings from his corpse, but when his mouth gets wired shut, the ballad abruptly stops. In a conventional musical, the reprise of “Nobody Knows Your Name” would be an 11 o’clock number, an emotional release for its protagonist. The song seemingly permits emotional release for Elmer’s spirit, but continuing indignities upon Elmer’s body erode his humanity and his story.

If Elmer McCurdy can’t have his showstopper, then the real showstopper ends up with a living character whom the audience least expects...

"Up to the Stars"

On stage, L.A. Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi (Thom Sesma) seems average, autopsying McCurdy’s mummy after it was discovered hanging in an amusement park painted Day-Glo red. That is, until the coroner launches into a classy serenade to brag about celebrities who wound up on his examining table.

The rib-cracking lyrics recall the unfortunate fates of Natalie Wood, Sharon Tate, and Marilyn Monroe, whose cadaver ignited Noguchi's career. He also sings of Elvis Presley, “Our time together, it will be in my memoirs!” as Noguchi’s 1985 book Coroner At Large details his role as an advisor in the autopsy of the King of Rock.

Noguchi’s press conferences and public statements inflamed the disputes and conspiracy theories orbiting his mortuary subjects, the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy also among them. "Up to the Stars" only scratches the surface of Noguchi’s contentious reputation and experience as the "Coroner to the Stars," the namesake of his 1984 book.

Noguchi has been credited with — or accused of — drawing attention to the coroner profession, having been charged with professional insensitivity among other accusations that threatened his job. But he didn’t deny his gallows humor: “Certainly I may have been a little flamboyant, even a 'publicity hound,'” he wrote in Coroner to the Stars.

"Our Dear Brother" (reprise)

In this reprise of “Our Dear Brother,” delegates from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, claim Elmer McCurdy just before his legally mandated cremation in L.A. They conceivably targeted McCurdy to profit from tourist interest in the Old Wild West. In Svenvold’s words, this would have rendered McCurdy, once again, “an attraction, not exactly in the carnival sense, but not too far from it.”

As in the musical, Noguchi ultimately approved the claim but implemented security measures for the transfer of McCurdy’s body. According to Svenvold, it constituted a confidential procedure where Oklahoma medical examiner Jay Chapman telegrammed a coded message to Noguchi.

"Crimson Thread"

This mourning hymn, sung by the Pawhuska delegates, is about life and human connection. What keeps us going? How do you spend or waste your life? How does the world dignify your body, or not, after you’re gone? During the song, cement is poured into the grave (which actually happened, to prevent further disturbance to his body) as Elmer’s spirit looks on with ambivalence, or perhaps peace. Sixty-six years after his death, in 1977, the journey of Elmer McCurdy ends.

"Dead (Finale)"

The finale again reminds us we all die someday and we live with various questions about it: When do we “end”? Is it death or later? How are our body and life perceived by the living? Maybe we take comfort in the fact that our bodies are not likely to endure Elmer McCurdy’s fate. Maybe Elmer McCurdy is a cautionary tale. Maybe he was simply a prop battered by capitalism.

The interpretative layers do not end here. Again, there’s something about a mummy that acts as a funhouse mirror for our mortality.

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Photo credit: Dead Outlaw on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)