{"id":4441,"date":"2021-10-16T08:37:30","date_gmt":"2021-10-16T12:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=4441"},"modified":"2021-10-16T12:18:49","modified_gmt":"2021-10-16T16:18:49","slug":"watermelon-dream-guy-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/watermelon-dream-guy-clark\/","title":{"rendered":"Watermelon Dream (Guy Clark)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Watermelon Dream\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/csMmvRM0jNg?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>This is probably my all-time favorite summer song &#8212; partly because of the lyrics and the way they fit with the melody, and partly because the guitar arrangement fell together so comfortably. It may have taken an hour or so, just playing and seeing what felt right, and that was over thirty years ago, and I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve changed a note.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-4436 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Guy-Clark-old-no1.jpg?resize=300%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" \/>I&#8217;d been aware of Guy Clark sort of tangentially for a long time, but tended to scratch my itch for Texas songwriters with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/mr-mudd-and-mr-gold\/\">Townes Van Zandt<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/because-of-the-wind\/\">Joe Ely<\/a> (and, via Ely, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/row-of-dominoes\/\">Butch Hancock<\/a>). Then Guy started coming through the Boston area regularly, and the first time I saw him I was blown away. As it turned out, almost all the songs that blew me away were from his first album, <em>Old No1<\/em>. Over the years I&#8217;ve learned half the songs on that record, and wouldn&#8217;t mind learning the other half, but as with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/best-possible-worlds\/\">Kris Kristofferson<\/a>, I pretty much got stuck on the first album. Except&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;this is the song of Clark&#8217;s I play most often and it&#8217;s from a much later album, <em>Old Friends<\/em>, which I don&#8217;t even remember owning. My guess is I got it as a comp back when I was reviewing for the Boston Globe, listened a couple of times, and that was that, except for this one, which I instantly fell in love with. As it happens, the only other Clark song I&#8217;ve put up in this series is &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/anyhow-i-love-you\/\">Anyhow, I Love You<\/a>,&#8221; which is from his second album, though I picked up from a Kerrville Folk Festival anthology. None of which is particularly interesting, but they&#8217;re both pretty songs.<\/p>\n<p>As for the guitar part, I started playing this when I was getting seriously into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/masanga\/\">Congolese acoustic styles<\/a> and exploring rhythms that were not straight-ahead, 2\/4 alternating bass. I suspect <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/peanut-butter-conspiracy\/\">Jimmy Buffett<\/a> was the person who got me thinking about using a Caribbean lilt on country songs&#8211;especially warm, summer country songs&#8211;along with Ry Cooder&#8217;s version of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hell-have-to-go\/\">He&#8217;ll Have to Go<\/a>,&#8221; which I originally played in E, pretty similarly to this one. By the time I added that one to the Songobiography, I was playing it in F and got a lot fancier and more Caribbean, but this has more interesting chords and the break just sort of rode in on them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is probably my all-time favorite summer song &#8212; partly because of the lyrics and the way they fit with the melody, and partly because the guitar arrangement fell together so comfortably. It may have taken an hour or so, just playing and seeing what felt right, and that was over thirty years ago, and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/watermelon-dream-guy-clark\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Watermelon Dream (Guy Clark)<\/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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - 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I'd probably heard a few of Guy's recordings, maybe \"Homegrown Tomatoes\" on the radio, but I was more of a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Kerrville LP","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/Kerrville-LP.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5998,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/boxcars\/","url_meta":{"origin":4441,"position":1},"title":"Boxcars (Joe Ely\/Butch Hancock)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 9, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another I got from Joe Ely, penned by Butch Hancock. I've paid tribute to that pairing a few times already, in my posts for \"West Texas Waltz,\" \"Row of Dominoes,\" and \"Wishing for You,\" and don't have more to say about them... Joe reshaped my ideas about what I\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\/07\/Joe-Ely-LP-e1660418076967.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2187,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/oil-money\/","url_meta":{"origin":4441,"position":2},"title":"Oil Money (Bill Morrissey)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"December 10, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"In the early 1980s, I rarely played a set that didn't include a Bill Morrissey song, and this was the one I sang most frequently -- in part because Bill didn't do it all that often, so I could kind of lay claim to it. Unlike a lot of Bill\u2019s\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"bill-morrissey-lp","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Bill-Morrissey-LP-300x299.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3801,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/me-and-billy\/","url_meta":{"origin":4441,"position":3},"title":"Me and Billy the Kid (Joe Ely)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 30, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I've already written about my introduction to Joe Ely and my affection for his work, and I'm happy to revisit the subject, because I owe him a lot. Beyond the great songs I learned off his records, and the records themselves, it was a whole attitude toward music. Along with\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\/2019\/05\/Ely-Liberty-Lunch-297x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2997,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/because-of-the-wind\/","url_meta":{"origin":4441,"position":4},"title":"Because of the Wind (Joe Ely)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 28, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"I first heard Joe Ely in 1979-80, when I was visiting my erstwhile washboard player, Rob Forbes, in Ithaca\u00a0 and a friend of his played me Honky Tonk Masquerade. Rob's friend introduced it as a fusion of new wave rock with country music, but I didn't hear anything new wave\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\/07\/Joe-Ely-LP-e1660418076967-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5793,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/desperados-waiting\/","url_meta":{"origin":4441,"position":5},"title":"Desperados Waiting for a Train (Guy Clark)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 5, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"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\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\/2025\/06\/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west-e1748878506721.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4441"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4446,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4441\/revisions\/4446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}