Song of the Day 2/8: Guy Clark, “Desperados Waiting for a Train”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

Texas politics are looking better after a Democrat trounced the MAGA candidate last week in a special election, boosting the party’s chances to gain the House majority in Congressional elections later this year. But Texas being Texas, we can’t always count on the politics there.

What we can count on is the music from Texas, where outlaws, cowboys, barflys, gamblers and melancholy singer-songwriters have been cranking out great stuff for nearly a century. They’re much more likely to have a Mexican in their band than crack him on the head.

The trail starts with the inventor of country-western music, Jimmie Rodgers, and honky-tonkers like Hank Williams who soon followed him in the ’40s. In the ‘70s Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and others burst out of the hill country outside Austin with Outlaw music, country infused with rock energy. A little later the “flatlanders” ambled in from up around Lubbock —Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and friends.

And from whenever and wherever guys with dusty boots sing tunes they thought up themselves we have the singer-songwriters — Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, Ray Wylie Hubbard — the list goes on.

The singer-songwriters themselves tend to put Guy Clark at the top of that list. They gravitated to Clark, hanging out at his house, soaking up inspiration.

Clark left Texas around 1970 and headed for L.A., where he thought he might begin a music career. That didn’t work out so well — you can hear about it in his most commercially successful song, “L.A. Freeway.” He soon headed back south to Nashville and joined other young Texans who were finding the city congenial for starting the kind of music career they wanted.

“Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” is his most loved and respected song. It’s about his grandmother’s boyfriend, a rascal who taught young Guy the ways of the world in rural Texas. “He let me drive his car/When he’s too drunk to/And he’d wink and give me money for the girls.” He’d take him to bars where “old men with beer guts” played dominos.

Their lives were “like some old western movie/Like desperados waiting for a train.”

He visited the old man “when I was grown and he was almost gone.” They closed their eyes and “sang another verse of that old song . . . Come on Jack, that son of a bitch is coming.” The train was arriving at last.

The tune has had a profound effect on listeners. “This song reminds me so much of my grandpa I can’t hardly even listen to it,” one wrote. “I’ve been listening to this song for a quarter century and my eyes water . . . every time,” wrote another. “It helped me through my father’s passing last year.” And this one: “When I first heard this song I identified with the singer/songwriter. Now I am an old man like the one in the song. RIP Guy Clark.”

Guy Clark had a devoted following, but he was not a rock star. The Highwaymen kind of were. Waylon, Willie, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson could be called an Outlaw supergroup. They hit the charts with their version, performed here at a concert in 1990.

Here’s Guy Clark performing the song at his 70th birthday concert.

“Desperados” has also been covered by Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, Jason Isbell and many other recent artists. Here’s Isbell at Clark’s Austin City Limits Hall of Fame induction in 2015.