How many years had Jesse James been gone before anyone sang his praises in a saloon? I found myself wondering this last month, as a new outlaw myth took shape. Luigi Mangione — the man charged in the Dec. 4 shooting and killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare — was still a nameless, faceless gathering of pixels in grainy surveillance footage when a slice of the internet christened him a folk hero. Soon police released a photo of the suspect smiling at a hostel clerk, and people began to thirst over this modern equivalent of an Old West “Wanted” poster. By the day after the shooting, TikTok had supplied Thompson’s still-nameless killer with a folk song — though it was one unlikely to interest Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison, two artists who have recorded their own renditions of “The Ballad of Jesse James.” (It’s hard not to cringe at lyrics like “Your claim to life was denied/Billionaires you cannot hide.”)