Once again, I don’t remember where I first heard this one or when I learned it — I would have said I first heard Guy Clark’s own version, from his brilliant debut album, Old No. 1, but I just checked and found that it had already been recorded before that by Jerry Jeff Walker, Rita Coolidge, David Allan Coe, and Tom Rush, which means a lot of other people would have been singing it in clubs and I could have heard it almost anywhere.

It played a significant part in my life because I performed it during an interview on WERS, which had the best Boston Area folk music show in the 1980s, and Harry Lipson, who was producing lots of folk concerts including annual appearances by Guy Clark, was listening and liked my performance and invited me to appear on a two-day New England Folk Festival bill — I was the opening act on night one; the opener on night two was a local unknown named Tracy Chapman. All I remember about my set was that I took advantage of the unusually large audience to do my current favorite sing-along, “Duke of Earl.” I also remember a lot of flirting and socializing backstage, and got written up in the Boston Globe, and all in all it was a good weekend.

This song is pretty generally acknowledged to be Guy’s masterpiece, a slice of autobiography about his relationship with his grandmother’s boyfriend when he was a kid in Monahans, Texas, a small town on the Texas-Pacific railway line, with a lot of sand, some oil wells, and not much else. It’s the sort of place that, for someone like me, who grew up in the urban East, conjures up images of “some old western movie” — and apparently even Guy thought of it that way in hindsight.

Specifically, it recalls the opening scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, one of my all-time favorite movies: three desperados barge into the dispatcher’s office of a little station out in the middle of nowhere, lock him in a closet, then spend ten long, marvelous minutes of screen time waiting for a train. One dozes in a chair, bothered by a fly; one stands outside the station, cracking his knuckles; one stands under the water tank, with drips of water falling on his hat. Finally the train arrives, stops for a moment, leaves again in a cloud of dust. As the dust swirls, we hear a lonesome harmonica; as it clears, we see Charles Bronson, standing on the other side of the tracks, playing. He asks where Frank is; the lead desperado says Frank didn’t come; Bronson notes that they only brought three horses; the leader smiles and says, “Looks like we’re shy one horse”; Bronson shakes his head and says, “You brought two too many,” and after another long pause they go for their guns…

I don’t know if Guy was thinking of that scene; there are plenty of Westerns with desperados and trains and waiting; but that’s the one I picture him imagining, thinking back to his childhood, before his family moved to the Gulf Coast, and he settled in Houston, and then L.A., and Nashville. And it’s a bit odd to me that he frames his childhood as a scene out of a classic Western. As an easterner, it’s natural for me to think of John Ford or Sergio Leone when I’m in that territory, but I’d think he’d think of it as home rather than a movie. (Harvard Yard has figured in a lot of movies, but they’re not what I think of when I recall Harvard Yard; it’s where I grew up.)

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about Clark. I loved that first album, and learned a half-dozen of his songs, but when I saw him onstage he seemed like a self-consciously literary figure, the “Southern writer” posing for his statue in a regional pantheon, which was not at all how I’d thought of his music, and made me have second thoughts about it and him. I still like a lot of his songs — I’ve done posts about “Anyhow, I Love You” and “Watermelon Dream,” and there will be a couple of others up here in the near future — but a lot of his work is tinged with a kind of distanced romanticism, like he was displaying his fine craftsmanship rather than communicating as one person to another. I recently watched Tamara Saviano’s terrific documentary about him, Without Getting Killed or Caught, and it reinforced that impression: to me, the movie is really more about his wife Susanna, a fine artist who did the painting of a shirt on his debut album cover and wrote a bunch of songs herself–including some that were major hits–and Guy comes off as a brilliant but somewhat stiff and guarded character, never entirely comfortable in his own skin and always measuring himself against other people and trying to establish his greatness.

Which said… I don’t hear any of that in this song. This is just a small, personal vignette, and the cinematic romanticism of the desperado image underlines the simplicity of the genuine memories, the genuine relationship, and the genuine tenderness.