In my personal history of being a music fan, my great Bob Dylan awakening came in the 1980s. Perhaps it was not the best time to start out as a Bob Dylan fan. Yet I still have a fond attachment to albums like 1985’s Empire Burlesque. These were the Dylan albums I first heard with everyone else as they were released. Another album from that time was Knocked Out Loaded (1986), which I bought on cassette as it was released. I liked the album well enough, but like many others, I recognized “Brownsville Girl” as the standout masterpiece it was.
“Brownsville Girl” started out as a song entitled “New Danville Girl,” inspired in part by Woody Guthrie’s song “Danville Girl.” Dylan recorded “New Danville Girl” during the sessions for Empire Burlesque. That version was not officially released until 2021 when it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 16: Springtime in New York 1980–1985.
For whatever reason, Dylan, though, was not satisfied with “New Danville Girl.” He enlisted playwright Sam Shepard to help add some additional lyrics, and he also added other instrumentation, including saxophone, to the new version, now called “Brownsville Girl,” released on Knocked Out Loaded. This new version has one of my favorite lines from any Dylan song: “The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter / Is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.” In the context of the song, I find it one of Dylan’s funniest lyrics but cannot explain why.
Even for those who believed Dylan had entered a fallow period in the early 1980s starting with his religious albums, “Brownsville Girl” illustrated that the master was still a master. “Brownsville Girl” incorporates themes of memory, yearning, and lost love, building around images from across the country and the West, including throughout the song several references to a Gregory Peck Western film. The song makes one man’s memories seem as big and as important as the entire country.
Well, there was this movie I seen one time,
About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck;
He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself;
The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck.
Dylan’s version of “Brownsville Girl” on Knocked Out Loaded is sophisticated and beautiful, even though some may prefer the rougher cut of “New Danville Girl.” Dylan scholar Michale Gray calls Dylan’s delivery on the Knocked Out Loaded version “faultless” and “astonishing. Not a false moment, not a foot wrong.” (Micheal Gray, The Bob Dylan Encylcopedia, p. 99 (2006). I agree.
Because Dylan’s version reaches such heights, and perhaps because of the song’s length at more than eleven minutes, Dylan only performed the song live once. And also because of the song’s length, few artists have attempted to cover the song. For example, Reggie Watts did a shortened version for a 1980s era Dylan tribute album.
One wonderful version emerged when Bonnie “Prince” Billy (aka Will Oldham) performed the song at Actors Theatre in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky on November 11, 2012. Billy’s performance is part music and part acting, as he conveys the narrator’s feelings and memories. It took a major committment to tackle the epic song. And everything comes together beautifully as Billy is wonderfully backed up by Louisville’s Motherlodge band.
In the video of the performance, the image is a little grainy and the sound quality is good but not perfect. Yet it is the next best thing to being there for a rare moving performance of a song as great as “Brownsville Girl.”
And in a world with an endless number of covers of Bob Dylan’s songs, this cover performance by Bonnie “Prince” Billy with Motherlodge is really something special. Check it out.
Well, we’re drivin’ this car and the sun is comin’ up over the Rockies;
Now I know she ain’t you but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul;
But 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.
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