The characters in Corb's songs are a wild variety. Here's three of his outlaws. The first song is about a tragic criminal and one of the darkest songs I know. The second isn't as dark and features a good lesson about how to treat wait staff appropriately, and the third is rather light-hearted for a song about outlaws.
That first one is very well put together, with tempo changes and a good story. It's not too far away in tone from a number of Johnny Cash's ballads about men who end up getting hanged for killing people; but it's pretty hard for me to believe that, in the old days, a respected man would have been hanged for killing the men who raped his wife and daughter. That's not the way the world used to work.
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Maybe in Canada.
I always took it as a life sentence rather than hanging: "He'd never live to leave the jailer's tomb." I dunno.
DeleteYeah, that's not how it used to work.
Never Not Had Horses/a>
ReplyDeleteThis Corb Lund song reminds me of my Montana cousin, of a similar age to his mother and also who has had horses since her childhood. Not only that, but his mother looks a bit like my cousin. IIRC, Corb Lund's place in Alberta is several hundred miles from my cousin's in Montana, which in that neck of the woods means they are practically neighbors. My cousin's teams at the high school played those from a town a mere 150 miles away.
Gringo
Sorry about the HTML messup
ReplyDeleteGringo