geoLibro.org

In this [especially late] installment of a recent Staler Brothers-only run here we again find the boys waxing ruefully about the big, bad center of population. This time it’s Baltimore that incurs the wrath of these clean-livin’ country boys, in a song called “The Streets of Baltimore.” It’s about a couple that moves to Baltimore and splits up. Ostensibly, anyway. Because as usual for The Statlers it’s much more about the cultural geography of urban v. rural (Oh, by the way — please interpret that as a direct equation to sin v. salvation, respectively). Let’s walk through it:

The intro eases in as a lot of Statler tracks do. There’s gentle, loping, harmonized single lead line, and nothing else. Then the narrative begins and – oh, christ, seriously? In the first stanza? Alright, fine — the first stanza lays it out starkly:

I sold the farm to take my woman
Where she longed to be
We left our kin and all our friends
Back there in Tennessee.

First of all, using the word “kin” establishes a lot. You don’t even need the bit about the farm. We can infer.

Nonetheless, there it is and it’s helping to tell the story of a poor, poor slob who sold his farm in order to move with his bride to Baltimore, evidently a life-long dream of hers. And before I get into this a little myself, let me stop you right there and say that, yes, when you grow up in small towns, you grow up with seclusion and exclusion (both ways!) and your perspective on life is limited by default. One has to read or find other ways into engaging other cultures and worlds if one cannot travel to do so. But having said that…Baltimore? I’ve been. It’s ah-ite. Not sure about the stuff of dreams.

But the protagonist’s (P) lady friend seemed to love it. Oh, did she love it. And while P worked his factory job running “an old machine” (could none of the Statlers name a single type of factory machine that rhymed with any synonym of ’serene’? — actually, scratch that remark. ‘Old machine’ makes more sense — it contrasts well that the wife is out shopping and this dude mans some old, apparently indescribable heap of industrial machinery), his lady was living her dream.

You can see where this is heading, so let’s jump there:

I did my best to bring her back
To what she used to be
But soon I learned she loved
Those bright lights more than me.

Now, I’m a going back on that same train
That brought me here before
While my baby walks
The streets of Baltimore.

So, yeah. The dude becomes a drip in order to pay for the lifestyle (his excuse, not mine — my guess is that he wasn’t a barrel of monkeys back in Tennessee, either). Meanwhile the lady isn’t so interested in a drip and pretty soon he’s back on that train going the other way. Yep, that’s it. There isn’t that much going on in this song, is the thing. They don’t try to Baltimore up the music, for example, and in fact the arrangement and instrumentation is very uniform throughout (suggesting that, in fact, P has learned nothing?)

So it’s“Streets of Baltimore,” from 1974’s Thank You World. Dropped right down in — why not — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

And the geoRSS for all mp3s of the week.