Cash’s recording was a powerful piece of advocacy music; he fought to have it included on his Columbia album over the label’s objections, and the song helped bring Hayes’s story to an audience that might not otherwise have known it.

But a ballad, by its nature, simplifies.

It has to.

It compresses a human life into a verse-chorus structure with three or four minutes to make its case.

The Hayes of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” is a figure of pure tragedy — unjustly discarded by the country he served, destroyed by its indifference.

That narrative is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete.

It turns Hayes into a symbol again — this time a symbol of Native American suffering and American hypocrisy — in a way that, while sympathetic, still doesn’t quite leave room for the full human being.