Brown-Eyed Women and Red Grenadine

Robert Hunter and Robert Frost

Robert Hunter (photo by Evan Agostini.)

I. In the spring of 1990 I was explaining to a class of high school kids that they had to hear a poem to really understand it. For some reason that must have seemed good at the time, I wrote the first verse of The Grateful Dead’s “Eyes of the World” on the board (stone-age tech!) and asked the students what it would sound like if it were set to music. (There were no young Deadheads among these schoolchildren; “Touch of Grey” had come out four years earlier, but these kids were not lining up to buy In the Dark.) I then played them a cassette (another artifact!) of the song and asked them how the music fit the lyrics and how the sound was an echo to the sense. We had such a good time. When, a year later, I read Robert Hunter’s collected lyrics, A Box of Rain, I sent him a letter (care of the publisher) about how much I enjoyed it and mentioned the “Eyes of the World” class in which students talked about how his lyrics were complemented by Jerry Garcia’s music. I never expected a reply.

Of course, the next sentence should describe what I found in this envelope—

—but I’ll get to that soon as a way to talk about what has been my favorite Dead song for as long as I’ve been listening to them: “Brown-Eyed Women.”

If the song were released today, it would be called “Americana” and rightly so: it’s not really a rock-and-roll song and is as American as the Dead ever got. It’s been covered well by many Americana artists and these covers are frequently played on the world’s greatest radio station. People know and like it; it’s not some esoteric, unlistenable soundscape or cover that eludes the most dedicated collectors. But for years, I have been baffled by my reactions to this crowd-pleaser, always thinking it was great but unable to articulate an argument about its merits. When I try to explain to myself why I like it so much and find it as perfect as I think it is, it’s like trying to explain why something is funny.

It’s also a difficult song to pigeonhole: everybody knows how to react to “Eyes of the World” or “Black Peter” because the lyrics and music instruct us. You dance (or at least stand up and nod) during “Deal” and sit down during “High Time.” But “Brown-Eyed Women” is different. It’s not a comic song like “Bertha” or a lament like “It Must Have Been the Roses,” but somewhere in between.

What follows is my attempt to articulate what about the song makes it perfect.

Robert Frost in 1958; photo by Yousuf Karsh.

II. When Robert Frost said, “I never write a poem about what I write a poem about,” he was being facetious but also gave us a way to think about how art works. Paraphrased, the remark means, “The physical and occasional subject of the poem is a vehicle for its themes.” “The Road Not Taken” is about two roads diverging in a yellow wood, of course, but it’s about the nature of decision-making; “Birches” is about a boy swinging from birches, but it’s about escaping dull reality; “The Death of the Hired Man” is about the return of an aged farmhand, but it’s about conflicting definitions of “home.” Read Frost’s remark with an exaggerated pause in the middle—

“I never write a poem about [long pause] what I write a poem about”

—and it makes more sense, with the phrase “what I write a poem about” standing for the surface subject. The subject of that second “about” is how Frost examines the issues at hand. Shakespeare writes about Scotland, but Macbeth is about all places; Joyce writes about one day, but Ulysses is about all days.

“Brown-Eyed Women” is about an old bootlegger, Jack Jones, but it’s about loss, memory, and old age. The lyrics are spoken by a son who recounts the events of his father’s life and begins like an elegy:

Gone are the days when the ox fall down,
You’d take up the yoke and plow the fields around.
Gone are the days when the ladies said, “Please,
Gentle Jack Jones, won’t you come to me?”

Men of a certain age can recall their past feats of strength and a then-endless era when they left for a night of carousing at the time they currently go to bed. At the present time in which the song is sung, that strength and romantic potency are memories. The inverted syntax of “Gone are the days” reinforces the idea of loss that runs throughout the song more than straightforward language. Imagine if Hunter had written this instead:

The days are gone when the ox fall down,
You’d take up the yoke and plow the fields around.
The days are gone when the ladies said, “Please
Gentle Jack Jones, won't you come to me?”

“Gone are the days” is automatically sadder—the song’s first word sounds its theme—and is just enough of an elevation of diction, like “gentle” and “ladies,” to lend his subject dignity without making it mock-heroic or ironic. (Hunter does this in other songs, as when in “Black Peter” the speaker asks, “Who can the weather command?” instead of, “Who can command the weather?” or when he begins “Brokedown Palace” with, “Fare you well” instead of the more intuitive “Farewell,” or when another speaker urges his listener to never give his love “unto” a foolish heart.) This small adjustment evokes the past and the whole song works by evoking rather than explaining: “Jack Jones” suggests a cool character in way that Charlie Phogg does not.

Hunter then moves into the old man’s biography:

Nineteen-twenty when he stepped to the bar,
Drank to the dregs of the whiskey jar;
Nineteen-thirty when the wall caved in,
He made his way selling red-eyed gin.

Prohibition began in 1920 and was repealed in 1933, but you can’t sing “1933” here and only a twerp would raise a hand and say, “Mr. Hunter! You’ve misdated the 21st Amendment!” As with the fallen ox, this is another example of Jones’s previous strength: he was once able to drink to the dregs of the whisky jar, a young man’s feat. That whisky jar is like everything else when one is young, drinking deep, and sucking the marrow out of life. And when the Great Depression was underway—the wall caved in—he survived. In Ulysses, a character claims that an Englishman’s proudest boast is, “I paid my way” and Jack Jones paid his—another example of his former life. No law was about to stop him.

Jones’s success as a bootlegger was matched by his success as a father:

Delilah Jones was the mother of twins
Two times over and the rest were sins.
Raised eight boys, only I turned bad:
Didn’t get the lickins that the other ones had.

Raising eight kids—boys, no less, some born before he married Delilah—and having only one of them “turn bad” is a pretty good work. We also don’t really know how “bad” the speaker is: is he a criminal? A lout? A pain in the neck? Is he being playful or measuring himself against the success of his brothers? Again, everything is suggested more than stated. That the speaker tells us why he turned bad—he didn’t get the lickins—suggests either that he was his father’s favorite or the youngest: by the eighth, Jack and Delilah may have been too exhausted for discipline, a family dynamic frequently insisted upon by the oldest and denied by the youngest in families all over the world.

The good times are interrupted out of the blue and the lyrics move to the crisis as the song moves into its bridge:

Tumble down shack in Bigfoot county;
Snowed so hard that the roof caved in.
Delilah Jones went to meet her God
And the old man never was the same again.

You can search for “Bigfoot County,” but like Melville says, you won’t find it on any map because true places never are. The name evokes an Appalachian backwoods and the listener fills in all the details. Anyone can picture that shack from the five words in that line just as they can picture a hearty youth from the name “Jack Jones.” Recalling the opening, Delilah is another thing, the thing that’s gone; without it, the song would be a portrait of satisfaction. “And the old man never was the same again” is surely an example of direct, simple language working better than elaborate expressions. Many of us have known an old man who found himself alone and never was the same. Jack Jones doesn’t become like August West in “Wharf Rat,” blind and dirty, but he can’t return to a time before the caving in of the roof. Gone are the days indeed.

The speaker reverts to a memory of his father’s trade:

Daddy made whiskey and he made it well:
Cost two dollars and it burned like hell.
I cut hickory just to fire the still.
Drink down a bottle and you’re ready to kill.

Jack Jones could take up the yoke, and deliver the shine. It was expensive but good. The last line here is another reminder of youth contrasted with age: “ready to kill” is colloquial and figurative, like “dressed to kill,” meaning “ready for anything.” But the older folks aren’t drinking down a bottle of anything, nor are they ready to kill. The dregs in the whiskey jar will stay there.

The chorus that runs through the song conflate the speaker’s thoughts about the old man’s past, present, and future. It’s about as perfect an example of poetic economy as you’ll find in a song:

Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin’ down
And it looks like the old man’s gettin’ on.

Like almost everything else in the song, the chorus works by suggestion: we never learn about any actual brown-eyed women because they work here as an example, like red grenadine, of better memories mingled with those of loss. The brown-eyed women, the red grenadine, the ladies and the liquor, the strength, youth, and the wife are gone like everything else. All of those are memories. Hunter seemed to originally waver between “brown-eyed” and “brown-haired women,” and “brown-haired” makes more sense in terms of a pleasant memory because it contrasts what must be the grey Jack Jones now sees when he looks in the mirror. But, as with “1933,” the singing dictates the word choice: try it yourself and you’ll find that “brown-eyed women” is easier to sing (and sounds better) than “brown-haired women.” In his Preface to A Box of Rain, Hunter says, “Rhyme, rhythm, and manageable phrasing impose restriction on what might be said,” which is what we find with swapping “eyed” for “haired.” The first two lines of the chorus recall that glorious and affirming past; the second two describe the present and future. The thunder and rain pouring down signal the hard times of the old man’s current situation as he’s “gettin’ on,” far removed from his former glory. The old man never was the same again.

Hunter’s draft of “BHW & R Gren.” Photo from the Relix article linked above.

This song about an older man’s life isn’t Sinatra considering “The September of My Years” or Dylan looking back on his ups and downs in “I Contain Multitudes”—those songs are like emotional resumes and point their listeners to a clearer understanding of what the speaker’s life means and what it’s about. “Brown-Eyed Women” by contrast works by evocations of the past and suggestions of what made that past triumphant and tragic. It’s a look at a life in full. Hunter never gets sentimental and one can imagine a song with this chorus being turned into a cheesy drinking song with the wrong melody; we can thank Jerry Garcia for finding a way to suit the tune to the lyrics. The song isn’t bouncy but it does bounce, its rhythm and tones perfectly suiting Jack Jones’s highs and lows.

III. Here’s the letter from Hunter. You can imagine my reaction, especially to the last sentence:

His remark, “What you get out of a poem that engages you is a look at yourself” is like Frost’s “what I write a poem about”: a way to think about why what we read grabs us and why we read at all. Hamlet tells a troupe of actors that the purpose of of art is to hold a mirror up to nature—human nature. As read about Jack Jones, we think about how this story about a bootlegger is about “gettin’ on” and yet recalling, in a time of thunder and rain, the flashes of color that made that life enjoyable, “Brown-Eyed Women” doesn’t sentimentalize old age or offer advice about “living life to the fullest.” It shows us what that stage of life—“gettin’ on”—is like. It’s a mirror that reflects the kind of shared experience (what Hunter calls “attitudes, aspirations, and vulnerabilities”) common to so many people. Yeats told us that “an aged man is but a paltry thing” unless “Soul clap its hands and sing,” and that clapping is what we hear in the chorus of “Brown-Eyed Women.”

The lyrics and melody are terrific but a last element that adds to song’s impact is Jerry Garcia’s vocals. When he began singing it in 1971, he could naturally play the role of the son telling his father’s story; twenty years later, the age in his voice made it sound even more melancholy, an old man singing about one even older. As with “Loser,” the older man’s voice gave the lyrics an added weight. When, in July of 1995, a month before his death, Garcia sang that last line for the very last time, the audience couldn’t help but hear the sound of the thunder and rain pouring down. The song got a little sadder as Garcia got prematurely older, but it also became more moving. The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.

You can listen to the final performance here or at the link in the preceding paragraph.

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