{"id":3242,"date":"2017-11-11T08:44:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T13:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=3242"},"modified":"2022-09-26T11:03:00","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T15:03:00","slug":"tequila-sheila","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tequila-sheila\/","title":{"rendered":"Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\/Bobby Bare)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Tequila Sheila\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3nXcrDuPq6w?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>An absurd western outlaw ballad with a trick ending, from the nimble pen of Shel Silverstein, thanks to Bobby Bare. I&#8217;ve already paid tribute to Shel&#8217;s work in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/last-truck-drivin-man\/\">a previous post<\/a>, so now on to Mr. Bare&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Honestly, I&#8217;m not all that wild about Bare&#8217;s singing&#8211;he&#8217;s a solid country singer but not an exceptional one&#8211;but damn, did he have <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-3243 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP.jpg?resize=300%2C298&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"298\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP.jpg?resize=300%2C298&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP.jpg?w=320&amp;ssl=1 320w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>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&#8217;t heard, which was true of something like a dozen of Bare&#8217;s records. He&#8217;d been mostly a singles artist until he recorded a double album of Shel&#8217;s songs in 1973, <em>Lullabies, Legends, and Lies<\/em>, which included &#8220;Rosalie&#8217;s Good Eats Cafe,&#8221; a small-town, late-night classic that clocks in at over eight minutes &#8212; maybe still a record for a country song without instrumental solos.<\/p>\n<p>I listened to that first album, and it had a couple of songs I wanted to learn, so I bought another, and then another&#8230; and after a while I noticed that along with the Silverstein songs were some great ones by other writers, like Bob McDill&#8217;s &#8220;Song of the South&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p><em>Cotton in the road, cotton in the ditch,<br \/>\nWe all picked the cotton and never got rich.<br \/>\nDaddy was a veteran, a southern Democrat,<br \/>\nSaid, &#8220;They ought to kill a rich man to vote like that.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-3244 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/bare-me-and-mcdill.jpg?resize=150%2C150&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/>So then it turned out Bare had a whole album of McDill&#8217;s songs, and eventually I learned he&#8217;d been Billy Joe Shaver&#8217;s publisher and persuaded Shaver to stick with the business when no one was recording his songs&#8211;though also taking a substantial cut of Shaver&#8217;s earnings when Waylon did <em>Honky Tonk Heroes<\/em>&#8230; which, OK, that&#8217;s a somewhat ambiguous legacy, but let&#8217;s go back from there to his first big hit, &#8220;Detroit City,&#8221; by Danny Dill and the pre-stardom Mel Tillis; and a couple by the pre-stardom Tom T. Hall, &#8220;Margie&#8217;s at the Lincoln Park Inn&#8221; and &#8220;How I Got to Memphis&#8221;; and a couple more by the pre-stardom Kris Kristofferson, like &#8220;Come Sundown&#8221;; and Tompall Glaser and Harlan Howard&#8217;s &#8220;Streets of Baltimore&#8230;&#8221; Basically, if you&#8217;re looking for good country songwriting&#8211;the best of that golden era when writers like Kristofferson and Hall were reinventing the genre&#8211;his albums are a good place to find some classics and &#8212; more to the point &#8212; a lot of less familiar but equally great material.<\/p>\n<p>Which said, he also did all those Shel Silverstein songs, some of which are classics, some profound, some dopey novelties, <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-3273 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Panchovilla3-222x300-1.jpg?resize=222%2C287&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"222\" height=\"287\" \/>some just dopey, some outright dumb&#8230; and some walk a bunch of those borderlines, like f&#8217;rinstance, &#8220;Tequila Sheila.&#8221; I&#8217;m a fluent Spanish-speaker and deeply engaged with Mexican culture, but there&#8217; s something gloriously silly about rhyming &#8220;Sheila&#8221; with &#8220;Pancho Villa&#8230;&#8221; and the rest feels to me like an absurdist Western in the same tradition as\u00a0<em>Cat Ballou<\/em>&#8230; and it always worked well in the bars.<\/p>\n<p>(As for the print behind me in the video, it&#8217;s a Maillol my parents bought in their courting days and I usually get it out of the way when I&#8217;m filming videos, because it&#8217;s distracting&#8230; but by chance I forgot when I was filming this one, and it felt kind of appropriate.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An absurd western outlaw ballad with a trick ending, from the nimble pen of Shel Silverstein, thanks to Bobby Bare. I&#8217;ve already paid tribute to Shel&#8217;s work in a previous post, so now on to Mr. Bare&#8230; Honestly, I&#8217;m not all that wild about Bare&#8217;s singing&#8211;he&#8217;s a solid country singer but not an exceptional one&#8211;but &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tequila-sheila\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\/Bobby Bare)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\/Bobby Bare) - Old Friends: A Songobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tequila-sheila\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\/Bobby Bare) - Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An absurd western outlaw ballad with a trick ending, from the nimble pen of Shel Silverstein, thanks to Bobby Bare. I&#8217;ve already paid tribute to Shel&#8217;s work in a previous post, so now on to Mr. Bare&#8230; Honestly, I&#8217;m not all that wild about Bare&#8217;s singing&#8211;he&#8217;s a solid country singer but not an exceptional one&#8211;but &hellip; Continue reading Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\/Bobby Bare) &rarr;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tequila-sheila\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Old Friends: A Songobiography\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-11-11T13:44:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-09-26T15:03:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP-300x298.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ElijahWald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elijah Wald\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Elijah Wald\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/20e4f69f2f284ea0ff728a9d1b7720a9\"},\"headline\":\"Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\\\/Bobby Bare)\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-11-11T13:44:00+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-09-26T15:03:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":579,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/20e4f69f2f284ea0ff728a9d1b7720a9\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2017\\\/11\\\/Bobby-Bare-Down-Dirty-LP-300x298.jpg\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.elijahwald.com\\\/songblog\\\/tequila-sheila\\\/\",\"name\":\"Tequila Sheila (Shel Silverstein\\\/Bobby Bare) - 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Joanne was a smart, dark, funny, and encouraging presence throughout my early years with Dave. The mid-to-late 1970s was\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Dave-and-Joanne.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4455,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bloody-mary-morning\/","url_meta":{"origin":3242,"position":2},"title":"Bloody Mary Morning (Willie Nelson)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"October 23, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"I've always liked Willie Nelson's singing and guitar playing, and wish his records had more guitar solos. Until I saw him live I had no idea how quirky and inventive his playing could be. 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