I have a lot of favorite Bill Morrissey songs, and this is near the top of the list.

I was sitting at the dining room table on Appleton Road with Jeff McLaughlin one afternoon, when Bill came downstairs and sang this for us. He’d been working on it for a month, filling wastebaskets with discarded verses, and finally had something that satisfied him. We were blown away — though, to be fair, that was a pretty common reaction to Bill’s songs in that period. He wrote a lot of good ones later, but for me this was his golden era; “Small Town on the River” had set the standard, and he was writing short stories that rhymed and scanned, conjuring scenes that were intensely visual and characters who felt fully-conceived and completely alive.

The story was more or less autobiographical. As he wrote in the liner notes to his first album (he hadn’t wanted notes, but I insisted, and I’m glad to have them): “Barstow is a town in the Mojave Desert on Interstate 40. I was close to broke and trying to get from Los Angeles to New Hampshire. After two and a half days on the entrance ramp I gave up trying to hitchhike out of town and walked to the freight yard. The song starts a little after that.”

It really doesn’t need more of an introduction, but a couple of things might be worth mentioning. Like, when I first heard it, I thought he’d made up the lyric the drunken character named Parks sings as they sit around the fire, but Bill was recalling a real song from the 1940s, “Dear Okie,” originally recorded by a singer named Doye O’Dell, shortly covered by a bunch of other singers, including Spade Cooley, and revived in the 1960s folk scene by the New Lost City Ramblers and on the country scene by Hank Thompson.

I’ve sung this a lot of places over the years, though mostly for friends over late night bottles of whiskey rather than onstage. Most recently, I spent a few days in Kansas City, staying with Bob and Diana Suckiel, who were hosting a house concert for me. That’s a funny story, because they used to have a club called the Foolkiller, which I remember because I was booked there back in the mid-1980s and it is the only gig I ever had that drew literally no one. We waited around for a while, and then Bob or Diana said they knew some folks who were having a party, so we went over there and I spent the evening trading songs with a local family band that had just got back from playing a country fair. It’s a nice memory, odd as that may seem, and when I did the house concert, the parents from the family band showed up — neither they nor the Suckiels remembered my previous visit, but for me it brought the story full circle.

Anyway… the evening before the concert I was sitting around with Bob and Diana, drinking whiskey and recalling old friends and past times. They used to be regulars at the annual hobo convention in Britt, Iowa, and had lots of stories about that, and Bob worked for decades on the trains, so after a while I sang this for them. They’d never heard it, and Bob was impressed with the image Bill used in the chorus, “Don’t the freight yards sound like a drunk in a metal shop…”

I’ve already posted about my own experiences riding the freights in my posts for “Danville Girl,” “Roll On, Columbia,” and “Vigilante Man,” and have a fond memory of sitting by a fire in a freight yard somewhere between Wishram and Spokane with Joe, the old hobo I was riding with, and another old guy (both undoubtedly younger than I am now). I had a can of baked beans in my pack — my regular emergency ration, back to my first days traveling in Europe — and was going to just open it and eat it cold, but they shamed me into putting it at the side of the fire until it got hot. I had the typical middle class kid’s romanticism about living rough, while they had a sensible appreciation of the few comforts available. For example, I loved riding the freights, while they thought it was silly for a young guy like me, with a valid driver’s license, to be on the trains rather than going to the welfare office and getting money for a bus ticket.

I could chalk my affection for this song up to similar romanticism, which is why I tend to sing Bill’s New England songs, which feel closer to my own reality… except, really, I did ride the freights and have never lived in small-town New England. Anyway, I loved it from the first time he played it, and later noticed that the basic chord chord sequence is lifted (unconsciously, as it turned out) from Merle Haggard’s “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am,” which is another connection for me, since Bill was the person who turned me on to Haggard… and I just added the harmonica chorus to represent the Salvation Army Band, and here it is.

(For folks who don’t know Bill’s work, I have a bunch of other posts about him and his songs: “Texas Blues” — a later vignette from the same trip that produced “Barstow” — “Small Town on the River,” “My Baby and Me,” “Oil Money,” “King Jelly’s Good Morning Irene Song,” “Candlepin Swing,” “Soldier’s Pay,” and “Night Shift,” with others still to come. He was a good friend and a hell of a songwriter.)