My favourite story songs, Part 2: from Creedence and Kassenetz-Katz to Sufjan Stevens and Fairport Convention

I generally don't pay much attention to pop song lyrics, mainly because they're mostly witless rubbish. I don't mind that: I'm not looking for wisdom or insights into the meaning of life from people who've spent most of their brief lives off their skulls on drugs and booze and indulging in sex at every available opportunity. But I make an exception for songs which supply a narrative of some description, and whose lyrics aren't essentially reducible to "Cor, baby - you don't half make me feel randy!" (Obviously, politics are out: if I want to be lectured by callow leftist morons I can always visit the Guardian's Comment is Free site.) As you'll see from the rest of the list, my definition of a story is rather loose. 

Country and folk music excel at stories. Here's The Byrds with a lovely version of the folk standard, "John Riley" - Mills & Boon with meltingly ethereal harmonies:

A commenter on my first story songs post suggested the bubblegum classic, "Quick Joey Small" by Kassenetz-Katz. I couldn't agree more:

The next song is more a series of memories than a straight story. I won't pretend that Sufjan Stevens is my kind of performer, or that I normally relish songs about 12-year old girls dying of cancer - but this is truly affecting:

Now a tale of roistering, rogering, rip-roaring, gun-toting, murdering chaps who wear chaps hunting Pancho Villa, courtesy of Texas singer-songwriter Tom Russell's "Tonight We Ride":

The commenter who suggested "Quick Joey Small" also mentioned the great swampist Tony Joe White's genuinely poignant race-relations tale, "Willie & Laura Mae Jones". As it's one of my all-time favourites, I'm happy to oblige:

Okay, I'm a bit embarrassed about including Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station" from 1977. Not my kind of music at all (more of a Workingman's Dead and American Beauty man myself) and I'm not sure what's it's all about, but I've always loved it - even the silly electronic instruments:

Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho & Lefty" might just be the best-written song I know - simultaneously epic and intimate, every line and every image simply perfect. The lyrics are so brilliant, here they are (there's one couplet which always brings a tear to my eye - answer after the video):

Livin' on the road my friend, is gonna keep you free and clean
Now you wear your skin like iron
Your breath as hard as kerosene
You weren't your momma's only boy, but her favorite one it seems
She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams 

Pancho was a bandit boy, his horse was fast as polished steel
He wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel
Pancho met his match you know on the deserts down in Mexico
Nobody heard his dyin words, ah but that's the way it goes

All the Federales say, they could've had him any day
They only let him slip away, out of kindness I suppose

Lefty he can't sing the blues all night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down south ended up in Lefty's mouth
The day they laid poor Pancho low, Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go, there ain't nobody knows

The boys tell how old Pancho fell, and Lefty's livin in a cheap hotel
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold
And so the story ends we're told
Pancho needs your prayers it's true, but save a few for Lefty too
He only did what he had to do, and now he's growing old

A few gray Federales say, they could've had him any day
They only let him go so long, out of kindness I suppose

(The lachrymal lines are "Pancho needs your prayers it's true, but save a few for Lefty too/He only did what he had to do, and now he's growing old". Gets me every time.) 

I should despise everything about Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Wooden Ships". It's jazzy, it meanders and it's about the horrors of nuclear war: and yet it works.  That's possibly because of some arresting images: a survivor eating purple berries "for six or seven weeks now - haven't got sick once - probably keep us both alive", and of "silver people on the shoreline" (men in radiation suits, presumably). There are some embarrassingly hippyish lines - but hey man, it was, like, 1968, y'dig? 

I'll end with Fairport Convention's magnificent version of the traditional folk song, "Matty Groves", the best track from Liege & Lief, one of the best albums ever made. The tale of inter-class rumpy-pumpy involving Lord Donald's young wife and Mr. Groves - by all accounts, a diminutive sex-bomb - has satisfyingly tragic consequences: when Lord Donald finds out he's been cuckolded, he ices the rumpy-pumpers, and then orders that they be buried together, only with his wife "at the top, for she was of noble kin" (a remark which really wouldn't have gone down well in our somewhat more egalitarian era). It's a rollicking good story, and the quality of the musicianship is sublime - from Sandy Denny's gorgeous, pure, smoky voice and Richard Thompson's unique, blistering, twangy lead guitar runs to Dave Swarbrick's traditional fiddle playing and Dave Mattocks's Levon Helm-style backwoods drum sound. Glorious.