The Real McCoy

As I journey down the one-way road of physical and mental deterioration, I occasionally pick at little worries like picking at scabs. One is the preponderance of presumptuous “authority” as when a professor at my Quaker Meeting in NYC suggested inviting a famed writer who’d been a kid at the Meeting to come speak to us. Someone asked, “Do you think he’d be willing to do that?” The prof blurted out, “I don’t see why not!”
An engagement to speak was never made…
When I was a kid my father told us a story of the “Real McCoy” – a pig. A better pig than other pig breeders could produce. That had been stolen, and must be returned. I quite believed him, and still do.
But something seemed missing in the Hatfield-McCoy legend. What started it all? You don’t steal from friends, or toss accusations at them willy-nilly. Tensions were already there.
Now, I’ve known lots of Hatfields and McCoys. One I worked with was Black... In an area of well over 50,000 square miles (western Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio) there must be way more than 100,000 of them. Certainly not all in any real way intimately related to the feuders, but likely interested in the feud nonetheless.
What does a pig eat? Corn. What else does a farmer do with corn? Make booze. I’m gonna bet the two families were rival distillers. Now, another little scab I pick at is the beautiful song by the pretentiously named band The Band, called The Weight.
I picked up my bag, I went lookin' for a place to hide
When I saw Carmen and the Devil walkin' side by side
I said, "Hey, Carmen, come on let's go downtown"
She said, "I gotta go but my friend can stick around"

Then later, the verse that preoccupies me:

Crazy Chester followed me and he caught me in the fog
He said, "I will fix your rack if you'll take Jack, my dog"
I said, "Wait a minute, Chester, you know I'm a peaceful man"
He said, "That's okay, boy, won't you feed him when you can"

I thought it was “fix your rag” and wondered what that meant, so this morning did a google search.
In addition to a suggestion that the song is about spreading The Clap, I found this:
The “he” in the first verse is of course Jesus. The anonymous narrator comes off the dusty road as Jesus is about to be crucified and runs into him coincidentally. Jesus in spite of his larger concerns addresses the insignificant narrator… a frequently seen scenario in ancient runes like Beowulf by the way.
“Anny” and “Anna Lee” are amalgams of Mary Magdalene. Who was not a real person but a composite representing a flawed, all-too-human follower of Jesus.
The “Miss Moses” verse is simply a nod to Biblical characters, Jesus speaking to his tradition.
Crazy Chester is Judas. The “dog” is a metaphor for any situation in which somebody comes out of left field and imposes themselves on you and you feel oddly compelled to oblige. “Fix your rack” can be taken as a prevision of Jesus on the cross.

Elsewhere, the bit about Chester is claimed to be "the easiest of the segments to understand. Chester is dead, and he asks the narrator to stay alive to look after his dog. The narrator says hes a peaceful man, which might mean that he doesn't want to fight against death. But, Chester says feed him WHEN you can, which confuses me. If it were IF, it fit better with my interpretation. Still, though, i think that Chester asks the narrator to return to life to look after his dog."
Wow. Just wow. It is SO cool to be an authority.
Jan Harold Brunvand, a retired American folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah, is known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend. He says the term “The Real McCoy “referred originally to the superior booze sold by Bill McCoy, "a notorious Atlantic coast rum-runner in the early days of prohibition."” Hmmm. Or maybe from “the real Mackay”… “or from a high-grade type of heroin in great demand by drug addicts during the 1930s.” He continues, “But the opinion of language sleuth Stuart Flexner, written in 1976, still holds true: "The real McCoy is one of those tantalizing terms that many Americans have used but no scholar can trace."
“Recently, I've heard yet another explanation of "the real McCoy," which associates the phrase with the black American inventor Elijah McCoy. This new candidate provided the title for a museum exhibit of African-American inventions from 1619 to 1930.
“The exhibit was created by the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in 1989, and its catalog contains photographs of Elijah McCoy (1843-1929) and of his major invention, a lubricator for locomotives patented in 1882. The catalog explains, "His standard of quality was so rigorous that the term `the real McCoy' came to be applied to his lubricators and to stand for the highest quality product available."

OMG. It’s a lubricant. How’d THAT slip by me?
He never even mentions the famous feud.

Whale. Everyone’s a critic. And an authority. And here I’m doing what I’m criticizing others for doing: asserting MY presumptuous opinion as the correct one.

Hey, I didn't even undeerstand that "I'm a peaceful man" meant he's vegetarian, until that was explained to me...