Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein/Bobby Bare)

An absurd western outlaw ballad with a trick ending, from the nimble pen of Shel Silverstein, thanks to Bobby Bare. I’ve already paid tribute to Shel’s work in a previous post, so now on to Mr. Bare…

Honestly, I’m not all that wild about Bare’s singing–he’s a solid country singer but not an exceptional one–but damn, did he have great taste in songwriters. I first bought one of his albums because I was on a Shel binge and it had a bunch of Silverstein songs I hadn’t heard, which was true of something like a dozen of Bare’s records. He’d been mostly a singles artist until he recorded a double album of Shel’s songs in 1973, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies, which included “Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe,” a small-town, late-night classic that clocks in at over eight minutes — maybe still a record for a country song without instrumental solos.

I listened to that first album, and it had a couple of songs I wanted to learn, so I bought another, and then another… and after a while I noticed that along with the Silverstein songs were some great ones by other writers, like Bob McDill’s “Song of the South”:

Cotton in the road, cotton in the ditch,
We all picked the cotton and never got rich.
Daddy was a veteran, a southern Democrat,
Said, “They ought to kill a rich man to vote like that.”

So then it turned out Bare had a whole album of McDill’s songs, and eventually I learned he’d been Billy Joe Shaver’s publisher and persuaded Shaver to stick with the business when no one was recording his songs–though also taking a substantial cut of Shaver’s earnings when Waylon did Honky Tonk Heroes… which, OK, that’s a somewhat ambiguous legacy, but let’s go back from there to his first big hit, “Detroit City,” by Danny Dill and the pre-stardom Mel Tillis; and a couple by the pre-stardom Tom T. Hall, “Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn” and “How I Got to Memphis”; and a couple more by the pre-stardom Kris Kristofferson, like “Come Sundown”; and Tompall Glaser and Harlan Howard’s “Streets of Baltimore…” Basically, if you’re looking for good country songwriting–the best of that golden era when writers like Kristofferson and Hall were reinventing the genre–his albums are a good place to find some classics and — more to the point — a lot of less familiar but equally great material.

Which said, he also did all those Shel Silverstein songs, some of which are classics, some profound, some dopey novelties, some just dopey, some outright dumb… and some walk a bunch of those borderlines, like f’rinstance, “Tequila Sheila.” I’m a fluent Spanish-speaker and deeply engaged with Mexican culture, but there’ s something gloriously silly about rhyming “Sheila” with “Pancho Villa…” and the rest feels to me like an absurdist Western in the same tradition as Cat Ballou… and it always worked well in the bars.

(As for the print behind me in the video, it’s a Maillol my parents bought in their courting days and I usually get it out of the way when I’m filming videos, because it’s distracting… but by chance I forgot when I was filming this one, and it felt kind of appropriate.)