Song titles with city names in them are a mixed blessing. At least for citizens who aren’t members of the Chamber of Commerce.
“San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair,)” was a #1 hit for Scott McKenzie during The Summer of Love, but fifty years later, it is an embarrassment for the city where young men from tech start-ups go in hoodies to meet venture capitalists in suits.
Waylon Jennings’ “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” (a song with another parenthetically abusive title) turned a crossroads store and a dance hall into a Hill Country theme park overrun with nostalgia tourists, a bad taste destination described acidly by Jennings’ son Scott as nothing but “a place where they sell Luckenbach shit.”
In the late-60s, Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” made a hamlet in Eastern Oklahoma into the capital of anti-Anti-War resentment. Haggard came to regret the retrograde cultural politics of his most famous song, which is still popular anyway as “the red neck anthem.”
Laredo has had the misfortune of having its name in the title of a well-known song, too.
As every Laredoan in exile knows, new acquaintances all too often innocently but mistakenly try to get a friendship off to a good start with an a cappella rendition of “Streets of Laredo.” As if the song were essential to our civic pride or dear to our self-esteem.
Sorry to offend fans of the ubiquitous folk song, but “Streets of Laredo” just isn’t very good. It’s unfortunate to be associated with it just because you had the good fortune of having grown up in the town of the title. Of course, that means having grown up when many of the streets were still unpaved, but there was a thriving downtown.
If you love “Streets of Laredo,” stop reading now and pronounce Anathema sit on this heresy. Sorry. The rest of us bid you farewell and Godspeed. We’ll keep banging the critical drum slowly without you.
If you’ve decided to continue reading after that important caveat lector, I’ll venture to say that, specifically, the lyrics are dumb.
The melody, on the other hand, isn’t bad. It’s from an old folk tune of Anglo-Irish origin that was already being sung 300 years ago. I’m fine, as long as you just hum or whistle the tune and spare my ears the words. But please, if you must play one of the vocal versions, play it through your earbuds, thank you. Instrumental covers like Chet Atkins’ smooth jazz version on guitar are tolerable. Go ahead and play it on your car sound system, and I’ll make a face, but I won’t open the door and make a madman’s escape leap out into the moving traffic.
Like the folk song that it is, there are hundreds of different versions of “Streets of Laredo.” One folklorist expressed the opinion that we will never have a complete collection of them.
Nowadays, Marty Robbins’ 1959 recording is one of the best known. Okay, boomer, either that or Jim Reeves’ similar recording from 1961 is probably the one you heard growing up.
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day
I saw a young cowboy, wrapped all in white linen
Wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay
Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly [Lowly? Are you kidding?
And what the heck? Who’s ever heard a fife in Laredo?]
Sing the Death March as you carry me along
Take me to the valley, there lay the sod o’er me
[To the Valley? You mean to Harlingen or McAllen or maybe Donna?]
I’m a young cowboy, I know I’ve done wrong
I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy
[I’ve never seen a real cowboy in an ‘outfit.’ That’s what movie cowboys wear.]
These words he did say as I boldly walked by
Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story
Got shot in the breast and I know I must die
Go fetch me some water, a cool cup of water
To cool my parched lips, then the poor cowboy said
Before I returned, his spirit had left him
Had gone to his Maker, the cowboy was dead
Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Sing the Death March as you carry me along
Take me to the valley, there lay the sod o’er me
I’m a young cowboy, I know I’ve done wrong
The dying cowboy song was always known as “The Cowboy’s Lament.” That is, until the first line took over.
All the early 20th Century folk versions of the song that has become known as “Streets of Laredo,” the unwritten traditional songs collected and transcribed by people like John Lomax, are based on the same melodramatic scene. A dying cowboy hails a passerby to hear his sad story and confession. He’s wrapped in his white linen burial shroud, and we hear his final words before he’s taken off to the cemetery.
In the Marty Robbins record’s lyrics, it’s a mystery why the cowboy says, “I know I done wrong.” What wrong? You can only wonder, “And why was he shot?”
Sometimes a little mystery in a song is good. When there is an abundance of mystery as there is in Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” you may even have a hit. “Hallelujah” is a song mysterious enough to mean just about anything to anyone. It has been used in settings as diverse as an Emmy Awards Ceremony, Shrek, American Idol, and West Wing. It is mysterious enough to be interpreted by a long list of diverse artists, from Celine Dion to Michael Bolton, to Willy Nelson, k.d. lang, Neil Diamond, and Rufus Wainwright, …even to Bon Jovi! Not to mention the countless slacker hikikomori blog and bulletin board discussions about what “the secret chord” is, and what is meant by the “The fourth, the fifth / The minor fall, the major lift.”
Marty Robbins’ “Streets of Laredo,” however, leaves the cowboy’s wrongdoing unspecified for a different reason, one that has nothing to do with aesthetics. The mysterious sin in Robbins’ record was the 1959 equivalent of what we now call a radio edit, you know, a version, especially of rap music, without the 4-letter-words.
How things have changed! When we were in high school, the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” was too suggestive for AM radio, and we heard it on KTSA played in an electronically altered version: “let’s spend the [BEEP] together.” When the Stones appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the network required Mick and Keith to sing, “Let’s spend some time together.” The poor censors, they threw up their hands and left the rest of the song alone. They’d have needed a heck of a lot more than a beep to clean up the single entendre in “I’ll satisfy your every need (your every need) / And I now know you will satisfy me.” Every teenager in the world understood what this was about –even if our parents didn’t.
What the 60s recordings of “Streets of Laredo” left out had been clear in the earlier versions of the song.
The old English, Irish, and American folksongs were perfectly explicit that the young man is dying from venereal disease, an STD, to use the current euphemistic acronym.
This is clear in the original Irish song, “The Unfortunate Rake,” the one with the first recorded instance of the unforgettable “As I was walking” iambs of the first line.
As I was a’walking down by the Lock, [a hospital where STD’s were treated]
As I was walking one morning of late,
Who did I spy but my own dear comrade,
Wrapp’d in flannel, so hard is his fate…
The syphilitic comrade says,
Had she but told me when she disordered [infected] me,
Had she but told me of it at the time,
I might have got salts and pills of white mercury [an old cure for syphilis],
But now I’m cut down in the height of my prime.
Another ancestor of “Streets of Laredo,” an Edwardian song known as “The Trooper Cut Down in His Prime” is just as straightforward when you understand the old slang:
Outside of the barracks you will find two girls standin’,
And one to the other she whispered and said;
“Here comes the young swaddy [soldier] whose money we squandered.
Here comes the young trooper cut down in his prime.”
On the headstone at the trooper’s grave, there is a warning.
“All you young troopers take warnin’ by me;
Keep away from them flash-girls [prostitutes] who walk in the city;
Flash-girls of the city have quite ruined me.”
One of the first American versions hides the cowboy’s shameful vices behind a fig leaf of vaguely implied sins.
“Go gather around you a crowd of young cowboys,
And tell them the story of this my sad fate;
Tell one and the other before they go further
To stop their wild roving before ‘tis too late.
And:
“It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
It was once in the saddle I used to go gay;
First to the dram-house [saloon], then to the card-house,
Got shot in the breast, I am dying today.
Jim Reeves’ version adds “Rosie’s” to the song, “First to the courthouse and then down to Rosie’s.” It’s a destination we recognize from Western movies as the kind of house with many small rooms upstairs but no roses in the garden
Other versions take the poor cowboy “First down to Rosie’s, and then to the card-house.” From this is was but a short step for Marty Robbins to put “Rosa’s Cantina” in a prominent place in his mega-hit “El Paso.” Like “Streets of Laredo” on the More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, “El Paso” is a song that features a dying cowboy’s last words and has practically the same melody. The two songs have a lot more than a river in common.
Folksongs like “The Cowboy’s Lament” that tell a moralizing story, basically a sermon in song, have been called ‘homiletic ballads.’ In another of these homiletic ballads, the cowboy asks his listener to tell all the other young cowboys to “Beware of hard drinking before it’s too late.” It’s a pious and dull admonition.
When real cowboys on cattle drives were singing “Streets of Laredo,” there was no prudery among them about what the dying young cowboy had been up to during his “wild roving” in saloons, casinos, and brothels.
The song we heard on the radio when we were students in junior high school had been bowdlerized in an additional way.
Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, and other artists sing the lugubrious lines about the procession to the cemetery to the tune of a death march in complete seriousness. (How they got past the absurd adverb lowly without laughing is a mystery, though.)
Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly
Sing the Death March as you carry me along.
In older versions like “The Cowboy’s Lament,” the march to the cemetery had been a lot more fun:
“Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin,
Get six pretty maidens to bear up my pall.
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin…”
“Then swing your rope slowly and rattle your spurs lowly,
And give a wild whoop as you carry me along…
Jolly cowboys, pretty maidens, and wild whoops? This starts sounding like a party, and other versions go further in party mode:
And over my coffin put a bottle of brandy,
That the cowboys may drink as they carry me along.”
Now we’re talking. This “Streets of Laredo” isn’t just a song with a moral dear to the stern Prohibitionists. Where do I sign up for the open bar at the cowboy’s funeral procession and wake?
Sanitized versions of sing-along songs are fine in certain settings. After all, sitting around the campfire with a bunch of Cub Scouts singing about gambling, VD, and alcoholism wouldn’t be a good idea.
However, in the case of “Streets of Laredo,” the omissions leave the remnants of the song with an insipid flavor that doesn’t satisfy. What would pico de gallo be if you omitted the chiles? Similarly, “Streets of Laredo” as it’s mostly known today, in its ‘radio-edit’ version, has lost the spice that was originally the whole point of the song and left the cowboy’s story unintelligible.
Allergic as I am to the goodie-goodie version, I like the parodies better.
One of them, “The Briefs of Laredo,” takes the “white linens” of the cowboy’s shroud and turns them into underwear, keeping as part of the joke the awkward adverb lowly:
“Then beat the drum slowly, I wore my pants lowly,
“Try not to laugh as I waddle along.
“I looked awfully silly, exposing my undies.
“Now I’m a young cowboy and I know I’ve done wrong.”
“So gather around you a group of young cowboys,
“An’ tell them the story of this my sad fate.
“Tell one and the other before they go further.
“Pull up your low britches before it’s too late.”
When thus he had spoken, the hot sun was setting.
The briefs of Laredo no more were displayed.
We thanked the young cowboy, his boxers now covered,
An’ there stand his Levis, hiked up, to this day.
Allan Sherman, the comic genius who gave us the masterpiece, “Hello, Muddah, hello, Faddah,” set to “The Dance of the Hours,” relocates the Laredo streets to Miami and throws in some Yiddish.
As I wandered out
On the streets of Miami
I said to meinself
This is some fancy town
I called up mein partner
And said, “Hello, Sammy
Go pack up your satchel
And mosey on down”
I got me a bunk
In the old Roney Plaza
With breakfast and dinner
Included of course
I caught 40 winks
On mein private piazza
Then I rented a pinto
From Hertz Rent-a-Horse
For people like me who dislike the “Streets of Laredo,” it is annoying how the title and phrases from the song appear everywhere.
The 70s tear-jerker movie, Bang the Drum Slowly, was a sappy flop with a dying young baseball player substituted for the dying young cowboy. Even a break-through performance by a young Robert De Niro couldn’t redeem it.
Elton John has said that the Jim Reeves record was one of his favorites when he was still little Reggie Dwight growing up in a middle class London suburb. That probably accounts for at least one of the bizarre lines in his “Tiny Dancer” hit:
Hold me closer, tiny dancer
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen
You had a busy day today
Which just goes to show that mysterious lyrics aren’t everything.
Hang on, patient reader. I’m not finished with this complaint.
My third issue with the “Streets of Laredo” is its name and the first two lines.
Laredo? I mean, is there anything at all of Laredo — other than the city’s name — in the song?
Look at it this way: would the song be different if it used “streets of…” followed by any other three-syllable town where you might run into a cowboy in the American West?
“As I walked down the streets of El Paso…”
Or, “As I walked down the streets of Del Rio…”
Or, “As I walked down the streets of Cotulla.”
Or McAllen, San Diego, Uvalde, Las Cruces, or Las Vegas. You get the idea.
“Laredo” is just a line filler with maybe some hint of Western and Mexican exoticism.
But a real town on the Texas-Mexico border with streets like Iturbide, Hidalgo, Guadalupe, and Matamoros? No, not at all.
Everyone of a certain age will recognize with bittersweet pleasure the streets of Laredo so poignantly and precisely evoked by one of Laredo’s best observers.
Along the polished, gridded Salinas Avenue sidewalk in front of Great Western Finance footsteps there resounded differently than on the walk in front of the Jarvis Plaza bandstand or the glass bricks embedded in concrete in front of El Sol del Oriente or the Hamilton Hotel… the porticos, Ionic columns, fluted limestone, clerestory windows, Spanish tiles and archways… a vista shared with street vendors of fruit and ice cream, limosneras and cartoneros on their custom-made three and four wheeled carts. The street scene was punctuated at intervals with corner cops in light blue uniforms and white caps. One whistled operatic arias and another was round and portly, called by his nick-name, El Manzano.
These are the real streets of the real Laredo, and not just a phrase or a throw-away background for a folk song, a novel, or a movie.
The title of Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo best-seller has more Laredo on its cover than anywhere else in its 500 pages. There is so little Laredo in the TV mini-series based on the novel that the filming was all done in Lajitas, Terlingua, and Alpine 500 miles upriver.
The same with the Streets of Laredo movie of 1949 in which Laredo is so conspicuously absent. After the song’s traditional second verse, which was kept to go with the movie’s title, the theme song’s lyrics were drastically altered. And not for the better.
I was just ramblin’ through
Through the streets of Laredo
Just another stranger that day
On my way to anywhere
She was wanderin’ too
Through the streets of Laredo
Those adobe walls so old
Turned to gold I saw her there
She smiled at me passing by
And her eyes spent a moment with mine
And all at once, ay, ay, ay,
Seems the views took a new kind of shine
Now we never will roam
From the streets of Laredo
Never want to lose the spell
For here we fell in love
She smiled
And her eyes spent a moment with mine
And all at once, ay, ay, ay,
Seems the view took a new kind of shine
Now we never will roam
From the streets of Laredo
Never want to lose the spell
For here we fell in love
Ay, ay, ay
Ay, ay, ay
It was here we fell in love
Ay, ay, ay
Ay, ay, ay
It was here we fell in love
“Ay, ay, ay,” indeed! What kitsch.
So what?
No big deal, really.
Just don’t expect an appreciative smile when you start singing, “As I walked down the streets of Laredo.”
Sources:
Marty Robbins “Streets of Laredo,” from 1959 More Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs (Columbia)
Jim Reeves, “Streets of Laredo,” from 1961 Tall Tales and Short Tempers (RCA Victor)
Waylon D. Hand, “The Cowboy’s Lament,” Western Folklore 17 (July 1958), 200-205.
Kenneth Lodewick, “’The Unfortunate Rake’ and His Descendants,” Western Folklore 14 (April 1955), 98-109.
