Texas Music Heartache Number One
Song: "Brownsville Girl"
Artist: Bob Dylan
Number of Texas towns mentioned: Four
About this column:
"Texas Music Heartache" is about loss. It's about the
way you get more Texan the further away you are from Texas. It's
about music about Texas, musicians from Texas, and music that
sounds like Texas, like the winds on the Llano Estacado, like
the waves on the Gulf, like the bluebonnets in the Hill Country.
"Brownsville Girl" appears on Bob Dylan's 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded. Co-written by Sam Shepard, it's a love story about one of those women that you can only find in Texas--women who are beautiful and wild, maybe a little trashy, maybe a little fickle, but loyal in the end, and boy, they know how to make their men feel good.
The song's long--eleven minutes--and it rambles, but the story is fairly simple. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, all that. It starts out with a description of The Gunfighter, a terrific western starring Gregory Peck with the classic young-gunslinger-vanquishes-old-hero-to-make-a-name-for-himself plot. Throughout the song, the narrator drifts in and out of this movie, both lyrically and, it seems, literally ("I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play.")
Dylan next takes us back to the moment he met the Brownsville girl ("in your busted-down Ford and your platform heels") in the Painted Desert; they drive from there to San Antone, and a few lines later, he's lost her to Mexico. He's suddenly driving across Texas with a second girl, who doesn't seem to be from Brownsville, but at least she has "that dark rhythm in her soul." And that rhymes with the best lines of the song:
I'm too over the edge and I ain't in the mood anymore
To remember the times when I was your only man
And she don't want to remind me--
She knows this car would go out of control.
Trouble is, those beautiful lines bring us to The Problem of the Chorus. On first listen, it's indisputably a top contender for the title of Dopiest Rhymes Ever Sung by Bob Dylan. But let's give it a chance:
Brownsville girl
With your Brownsville curl
Teeth like pearl
Shining like the moon above
Brownsville girl
Show me all around the world
Brownsville girl
You're my honey love.
Okay. I find it easiest to think of this chorus as a joyous exhortation of the youthful narrator's pure, young love for his Texas sweetheart. He's too shook up to put these feelings into more erudite terms. This is the car going out of control, so to speak. It's just sweet, simple, spontaneous rhyming, the kind you might make up for your lover in a moment of giddy play. I let the word "Brownsville" expand in my mind to brown skin, and I picture a beautiful, young, golden girl laughing out loud. And when he says "shining like the moon above"--I like to think of that as referring to the Brownsville girl herself, and not her teeth.
There's a little interlude in Amarillo, and then our hero, in an apparent case of mistaken identity ("they were looking for somebody with a pompadour"), gets himself shot at by the police and arrested for some horrible crime. The Brownsville girl sees his picture in, of all places, The Corpus Christi Tribune, and comes to his rescue, providing him with a false alibi and a ticket out of his nightmare.
But then she disappears again. "I feel pretty good but that ain't sayin' much. I could feel a whole lot better if you were just here by my side to show me how...You know, it's funny how things never turn out the way you had 'em planned," sings Bob. We don't worry about him too much, though. By the end of the song he's standing in line to see Gregory Peck's latest, telling us that he doesn't have any regrets.
The song's theme is one of the oldest: The Redemptive Power of Love. The Gunfighter has the same theme. The title character, Gregory Peck's, is only able to break out of his self-destructive lifestyle for the love of a woman--but then it's too late. She was also a Texas woman, but a proper schoolteacher, not somebody tromping around in platforms and sleeping in an old Ford under the Alamo.
"Brownsville Girl" is about the power of sex, too, and of memory. The narrator in the song rambles with a kind of resignation now that he's lost his Brownsville girl. He only really perks up when he's singing about her directly, which is basically just in the chorus and a couple of other verses. Her presence pervades the whole song, though. She's like a ghost in the lyrics, a woman made ideal in the narrator's mind only because she left him. They weren't together long enough to know each other's faults, but he sure remembers her soft skin. When he tells her, "Hang on to me, baby, and let's hope that the roof stays on," the back-up vocalists scream.
So it doesn't really have a happy ending. So it's long, it's rambling, it's fairly repetitive, so it has a dumb chorus, so it's on one of Bob Dylan's less illustrious albums, to put it delicately. It's Texas. It's a man from somewhere else appreciating Texas and driving across it and the women you can only find there. It's a good song.