Old West saloon

I’m halfway tempted to try a few stiff shots of tequila before writing this post. OK, perhaps more than halfway tempted. I haven’t yet gotten to the point of the having the first, but perhaps you’ll be able to tell if and when I do. The key measure for me, I suppose, will be whether I wind up writing a post that I’ll deeply regret in the morning.

Why the stiff drink? Well, you need to understand today’s song, and you need to understand regret.

“Wild West Saloon Gunfight,”by Owen Gallagher (1947)

Kevin “Blackie” Farrell’s “Sonora’s Death Row,” (1975) takes us back to the Old West of our collective cultural imagination, and the sunny deserts lively cantinas of Northern Mexico. We should immediately dispense with worries about there being no actual town named Sonora or what precise time period the time’s set in. Just figure it took place west of “El Paso,” but south of the fictional Gantry of “Billy Gray,” and happened sometime after “The Devil’s Right Hand” took over Steve Earle’s anti-hero and before Sting’s young man “hung his head” in guilt over accidentally shooting the rider on the plains.

“Sonora’s Death Row” is a clear heir to Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” with cinematic touches that vividly render some key moments in the story. But this time, the factors clouding our hero’s judgment are more mundane and less romantic than the bewitching, “blacker than night” eyes of Faleena. We won’t let the theme of alcohol cloud our judgment, however. There’s more to the song than that, but we’ll need to start with that stiff drink–the hero’s, not mine. In today’s song, we’ll listen for both tragedy and authenticity, as different performers take on  this song’s pathos and gritty setting, and strive for an evocative balance that captures the heart of the song.

Pat proposed diving into lists of our favorites last week. I may develop a single-post sequel to Pat’s excellent “Essential Eleven,” but the entire blog is that kind of list for me. In the spirit of highlighting favorites, though, I’ll lead this post off with the performance of “Sonora’s Death Row” that was the first one I heard, and which sets the mark for me for reasons I’ll get into later: Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault‘s performance of the song from their album Seven Curses.

Here are the full lyrics (provided as the lyrics to Dave Alvin’s version, which we include below). Erelli and Foucault omit the first verse, as do several other interpreters.

You can listen to a YouTube version of Erelli and Foucault’s studio recording here and a solo performance by Foucault here that begins with a little confusion over the starting line–perhaps a good reason to have started with the first verse!

The Mezcal was free at Amanda’s Saloon

Given alcohol’s real-life role in fueling violence and crimes of passion, it’s actually rather odd that we haven’t seen it more often as a factor in our songs. There are a few exceptions. The bottle of burgundy (or “burgler’s”) wine plays a role in “Down in the Willow Garden,” but whether it impaired the killer’s judgment or served as a means to poison Rose Connolly is not entirely clear. Stagger Lee and Billy Lyons probably weren’t stone cold sober at the time of their fatal encounter. Alcohol was explicitly raised as the factor that made Young Clary so belligerent in Stan Rogers’s “Harris and the Mare.” The wild young cowboy and Faleena were sharing a drink when Robbins’s hero in “El Paso” challenged his rival, but he makes no mention of his sobriety or lack thereof. I suspect that many murder ballads stay away from alcohol because, as a kind of mitigating factor, it potentially diminishes the full, soul-scraping power of the crime and remorse for it. Certainly few go as far as “Sonora’s Death Row” in giving a role to alcohol.

Agave plant

I commented on one of the songs near the start of the blog that I believed that part of the cathartic effect of some traditional murder ballads takes place through them offering a kind of surrogate confession–allowing the singer or listener to express negative feelings about the relatively minor things they did do, by singing the stories of horrible things they didn’t do. It’s not just the catharsis provided by strong feelings of pity or fear, but the ability to make a pseudo-confession through the story, and have that stand in for something else in an emotionally meaningful way.

This phenomenon applies more to songs that have been with us for centuries and continue to be sung, but it strikes me as a plausible part of the appeal of this song for some. This is a murder ballad for a hangover. This is a murder ballad for sorting through the remorse and regret triggered by the excesses and misjudgments of the night before, however trivial they might have been (particularly compared to a drunken shooting). I don’t mean to suggest that today’s performers or I have ever had any of those nights or those mornings, mind you…

That’s only part of the story, though, in my judgment, and it’s not really about the alcohol.

Scene from “The Hangover”

I fell to my knees and I cried

The Western dynamics of “Sonora’s Death Row” set the stage for a classic tragedy. We start with the open promise and wild freedom of a Saturday night on the town after a week of back-breaking ranch work. We soon see that, apart from the tricks of the imagination played by the mescal, the hero’s actions display at least two more of the Seven Deadlies. Pride and Wrath appear alongside of the well-earned and relatively innocent variety of cowboy Gluttony.

While a song that simply blames the liquor might not be completely satisfying, “Sonora’s Death Row” comes through, beautifully and powerfully, because hits on something essential about actions that cannot be taken back and where they come from. It’s not from a bottle. Although our hero knows how he got himself in this fatal fix, he doesn’t evade the full weight of guilt for what he did. His concluding lament for the mescal still being free for the ranch boys does not come across as a biting social critique of the evils of alcohol so much as a longing for the happy freedom that’s been lost. The song offers the reversal and recognition of tragedy, and our protagonist doesn’t deny that his own character played a role in his downfall. He feels the guilt for all of it. In that sense, the song is thematically closer to Sting’s “I Hung My Head,” than it is to Robbins’s “El Paso.” This is remorse and not romance.

The boys of the old Broken O

Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault

As I said above, Erelli and Foucault set the standard for me for performances of this song. The reasons why are mostly peculiar to me, I expect, but I think they amount to something more substantive than this performance merely being the first one I heard. I can sketch them out, but I’m not sure how much good that will do you. They have mainly to do with tempo, voice, and tone. Erelli tastefuly adds harmony at the right moments on top of Foucault’s spot-on expressiveness on lead vocals–engaging and affecting without being maudlin. They provide enough of a hint of the ranchera style in the guitar arrangement to get the setting across without making the song into merely a regional or genre curiosity.

That being said, some other practiced hands and voices have taken their turns with “Sonora’s Death Row,” and each of them has good things to offer, and the contrasting arrangements might appeal to your own  imagined Old West or the spirit of the song better. The question of authenticity appears again here. Some performers wind up pulling it off more effectively than others. This is a subjective assessment, and I’m subjecting you to mine for the moment, at least to the extent of selecting a few of those who make a credible “case.” There are some performances I’d love to include, but can’t find streamable versions of to share, including Richard Shindell’s cover and Farrell’s original. My apologies for omitting them.

Also, it may be worth mentioning that I haven’t found a single version of this song sung by a woman–not even in the webcam “selfies” on YouTube. Whether this is because the song is not that old, that it is sung in the first person, because of some thematic aspect of its story, or some combination of the three, I’ll leave for your conjecture. Oddly enough, when searching for images for “hangover,” for this post, all the images that didn’t depict the movie by that name were stock photos of women. We’ll leave that, for the time being, to our sister blog, Gender Theory Friday. (Don’t go searching for that, by the way.)

Leo Kottke was among the first professional recording artists to cover the song, on his 1978 album Burnt Lips. It’s strongly marked by his signature guitar work, which in this case is surprisingly lacking in distinctively Mexican-style touches.

Robert Earl Keen has recorded both studio and live versions of the song. The studio version incorporates accordion and other Mexican musical “textures” to accompany the song. It’s a slow version you might hear over the jukebox in a contemporary cantina.

He gives the song a different treatment on his later album, No. 2 Live Dinner. To my ear, this performance is more “Tex” than “Mex,” with steel guitar accompaniment. It’s also one of the few with harmony vocals, although a small group of backers, rather than the solitary accents like Erelli’s. Several other “bar band” versions of the song take this general approach.

(I’ll add a non-Spotify version when I can find one.)

Tom Russell delivers a more pathos-laden solo vocal performance over a gentle guitar and occasional accordion.

Michael Martin Murphey included “Sonora’s Death Row” on his Cowboy Songs III, which like Erelli and Foucault’s Seven Curses, also includes “Billy Gray.” If you’re interested in diving into some of the themes explored in some of our Western murder ballads, Murphey’s collection is good one-stop shopping. His version contains Mexican-style accompaniment reminiscent of Keen’s studio version.

I haven’t yet found a non-Spotify version of Murphey’s performance. I’ll add it when I find it.

Dave Alvin, who is well-acquainted with guilty men, recorded the song on his 2006 album, West of the West. It’s more up-tempo and intense than Erelli and Foucault’s version, and Alvin’s vocal performance is effective in this way. It’s highly reminiscent to me of his “King of California.” He eschews the Mexican-style accompaniment in favor of a banjo, which is quite novel, but ultimately a little confusing, musically speaking.

I’ve stuck mainly with the better-known names, I think, in the above performances. Many more obscure artists have recorded, and countless others have made YouTube selfies, which we usually avoid. The internet provides a path to finding more obscure recordings, which has the advantage of leading you to things you might not otherwise come across, and the disadvantage of lifting up some performances that should remain obscure. I won’t paint all the performances I haven’t featured here with that brush, but it’s another element of the subjective sorting I’ve already done in presenting the performances above.

Among the somewhat lesser-knowns, at least to me, is cowboy entertainer Dave Stamey. Stamey included the song on his collection Campfire Waltz. He makes some good choices in this, and I find the waltz setting to be remarkably effective. It’s probably my sentimental favorite of the bunch, in a couple different senses of that phrase.

Wrapping up

Well, in case you were wondering, I got through the post without touching the tequila. I expect this post will be it for this week, although there may be an incidental update later. I was shooting from the hip a little on this one, and will take a steadier aim next time around. I nevertheless hope you found that I hit the target at least once or twice. Thanks for reading.