Outlaws - Clyde Barrow and Billy the Kid : Beta Version, October 2011

Rachel's setting of a poem by Bonnie Parker. We feel this is Bonnie at her most effective as a poet - and quite Kiplingesque in her continuities of past and present, and touchingly prophetic with respect of the inevitabilities of their future where myth, folklore, and history combine in vivid Americana - perhaps a little too vivid at times. This was pretty much the 'focus track' of Songs from the Barley Temple, with this version evolved at subsequent sessions in filthy public house backrooms & radio studio.

Recorded on Saturday 22nd October 2011 by way of rehearsal for our session on Genevieve Tudor's Folk on Sunday on Radio Shropshire the following day. Rachel adds that her main inspiration here was Ennio Morricone's Cheyenne theme from Once Upon a Time in the West....

Rachel - singing and banjo
Sean - fiddle, kaossilator and singing.

*
Billy rode on a pinto horse
Billy the Kid I mean
And he met Clyde Barrow riding
In a little gray machine
Billy drew his bridle rein
And Barrow stopped his car
And the dead man talked to the living man
Under the morning star

Billy said to the Barrow boy
Is this the way you ride
In a car that does its ninety per
Machine guns at each side?
I only had my pinto horse
And my six-gun tried and true
I could shoot but they got me
And someday they will get you!

For the men who live like you and me
Are playing a losing game
And the way we shoot, or the way we ride
Is all about the same
And the like of us may never hope
For death to set us free
For the living are always after you
And the dead are after me

Then out of the East arose the sound
Of hoof-beats with the dawn
And Billy pulled his rein and said
I must be moving on
And out of the West came the glare of a light
And the drone of a motor's song
And Barrow set his foot on the gas
And shouted back, "So long"

So into the East, Clyde Barrow rode
And Billy, into the West
The living man who can know no peace
And the dead man who can know no rest