"The Ballad of Billy the Kid" is a Billy Joel song from the album Piano Man. It was also issued as a single in the UK backed with "If I Only Had The Words (To Tell You)."

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."

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." 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.

In the last verse of the song, the lyrics switch from Billy the Kid to a "Billy" from Oyster Bay, Long Island. The writer Ken Bielen has interpreted the "Billy" in the final verse as being a portrait of Billy Joel himself since Joel was from Oyster Bay. However, in the liner notes to his album Songs in the Attic Joel claims that the "Billy" in the final verse is not himself but rather a bartender who worked in Oyster Bay, by the name of Billy Nastri. In an interview once Billy Joel mentioned that this song was about "record company PR hype". The lyrics may have been inspired in part by the liner notes from his earlier two-man album "Attila", which go on and on about the historic Attila the Hun, and then conclude, "Attila - the hottest band to come along since the Huns sacked Europe".

According to one of Joel's unofficial biographers, Hank Bordowitz, the instrumentation of "The Ballad of Billy the Kid" has details reminiscent of the composers Aaron Copland and Ennio Morricone. Copland himself wrote the music for a ballet titled Billy The Kid.

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Wikipedia