The Battle Hymn of the Republic

The Battle Hymn of the Republic is Perry Smith’s favorite song and the pair’s self-chosen “marching music” during their flight across the desert. Played first on a harmonica Perry had stolen the previous day, it accompanies Perry and Dick as they walk in step along the highway and sing, turning a familiar hymn into a shared rhythm for the road.

The Song on the Highway

After a driver refuses to pick them up, Perry takes out the harmonica and plays the song’s opening bars. He had taught Dick all five stanzas; walking side by side, they sing the opening verse and the repeated “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!” Through the desert’s silence, their voices give the song a forceful presence. The hymn’s marching cadence briefly binds the two fugitives in a common performance, even as the surrounding scene leaves their progress dependent on the next passing car.

Sacred Language and the Fugitive Road

The words Perry and Dick sing invoke divine judgment: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” On the highway, that scriptural language belongs to a hymn they carry with them as music, not as an explicitly explained moral reflection. Its public, martial cadence and the image of wrath sit beside the fugitives’ exposed passage through the desert, while the narrative leaves the tension between the song’s language and their circumstances unresolved.

The Full Song and the Quoted Fragment

The episode distinguishes between the song Perry and Dick knew and the portion the narrative lets the reader hear: Perry had taught Dick all five stanzas, but their walk is rendered through the opening verse and its returning Hallelujah refrain. That contrast makes the hymn both a shared repertoire and a sharply bounded moment in the scene. The full song belongs to their recent companionship; the excerpt, set against the desert’s silence, gives that companionship a brief audible form without extending the moment beyond the highway passage.

The Song as a Measure of the Journey

The performance follows a fifty-hour bus ride from Mexico City to Barstow and half a day trekking across the Mojave Desert, which has left Perry Smith and Dick bearded and dust-covered. After the first driver studies them and speeds away, their walk continues on foot: the hymn gives audible shape to a journey marked by exhaustion, exposure, and dependence on the next passing car.