This is neither the first nor the last Butch Hancock song I learned off Joe Ely’s terrific string of records in the 1970s. (Actually, I just checked, and this is off his 1981 album, Down on the Drag, which was not quite up to that standard, but still had some killer tracks.) I’ve already posted “West Texas Waltz” and “Row of Dominoes” (the latter of which I also recorded on my CD, Street Corner Cowboys), as well as Ely’s own “Because of the Wind” and “Me and Billy the Kid,” and there are more to come, because I immersed myself in those albums, and credit them — and later Joe’s solo live shows — with transforming my ideas about what I wanted to be playing and how, and why.

I know that sounds over the top, but somehow Joe showed up exactly when I needed him. I’d come out of my year with Dave Van Ronk playing a huge repertoire of Van Ronk songs, and a lot of old blues guitar arrangements, and some half-assed swing… and yet, I had always loved rock ‘n’ roll, and a lot of my skills were better suited to country music, which I had never understood… and Joe showed up, rocking hard and playing a blend of all of that, plus some Latin rhythms, and making it all sound like solid bar-band music rather than an attempt at some kind of innovative fusion.

And that band. Lloyd Maines on steel, long before he nurtured the Dixie Chicks; Jesse Taylor on lead guitar, sometimes playing too much for my taste, but often right in the pocket; Gregg Wright on bass and Steve Keeton on drums; and Ponty Bone on accordion, adding some Mexican flavor — my guitar break on this one starts out directly mimicking his accordion break, which I hadn’t heard in probably twenty years until I just went back and listened to it, but is engraved in my brain.

And that songs. A lot of the best ones were by Butch, and prompted me to hunt up some of Butch’s albums — Van Ronk was a huge fan; he once suggested Butch was the only songwriter in the US who could have hit New York the way Dylan did — but to my tastes, Joe had picked the cream of the crop. And there were also some fine ones by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and by Joe himself.

This isn’t one of the masterpieces — I love the first verse and chorus, but the second doesn’t stand up — and I’ve never performed it onstage and don’t expect to, but it was one of my first attempts to fingerpick a Caribbean rhythm, and I’ve been playing it for my own pleasure for almost fifty years.