Jerry Jeff Walker died in 2020. The death seemed to get lost in the covid news and I never read a great obit. This past year or two I have spent a lot of time thinking about his recording of “Navajo Rug.” Truly a great song and a great performance.
The song was written by Tom Russell and Ian Tyson. (Two giants with the kind of country music bios that read like scripture.) Tyson’s original recording of it won “Canadian Country Music Association Song of the Year” in 1987. When Walker covered it he also made it the title of the album. It’s in the Western Music top 500 songs of all time. I’m not going out on a limb in suggesting it’s a formidable song but why exactly? Let’s go all Room 237 for a bit.
Let me start with a Radiolab episode “Songs that Cross Borders” about the history of country music. Its thesis is that country music is the music of migrants everywhere, especially rural to urban migrants.
AARON FOX: Oh, where do you start? The first hit country song was a nostalgic reverie for quote The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane performed by Jimmie Rodgers and Fiddlin’ John Carson
ROBERT: The song was recorded in 1927, and that happens to be the moment …
AARON FOX: If you look at the US census …
ROBERT: … as he’ll tell you …
AARON FOX: When the United States crosses the threshold from more than 50 percent agrarian and rural dwellers to more than 50 percent urban dwellers.
ROBERT: In other words, country music really exploded — and this is not an accident — when most people no longer lived in the country.
AARON FOX: Country music is born when the country becomes a nostalgic idea.
That’s a bit overblown but something struck me listening to this: I never really liked country until the moment in my life when it became clear I would never live where I grew up. Sometime in my early 20s Hank Williams just started making sense. The flip side of the opportunities of migration is the mournful sense of lost roots. The fetishization of place names and the catalog of lost origins and possible destinations is a big part of country music.
More from that podcast:
AARON FOX: In fact, the steel guitar is the signature sound of country, because it’s recognized as iconic of a crying human voice. It’s called the crying steel.
One thing that makes Walkers’s Navajo Rug better than Tyson’s original is the excellent steel guitar throughout in Walker’s. There’s a falling melodic line but also a little tremelo that accompanies the “ai yi yi”. The crying steel perfectly chimes in with the vocalized distress of “ai yi yi” adding its own little “oh-uh-oh.” This kind of country chorus would be recognizable to Jimmie Rodgers.
So the overall narrative spirit of the song is rooted in a deep country tradition of mournful nostalgia for lost past, lost place. It draws from a musical vocabulary that similarly reaches into these deepest places. And it’s catchy as hell. The lyrics:
[Verse 1]
Well it’s two eggs up on whiskey toast
Home fries on the side
You wash her down with the roadhouse coffee
That burns up your insides
It’s just a Canyon, Colorado diner
A waitress I did love
We sat in the back ‘neath an old stuffed bear
A worn out Navajo rug
[Chorus]
Aye aye aye, Katie
Shades of red and blue
Aye aye aye, Katie
Whatever became of the Navajo rug and you?
[Verse 2]
Well old Jack the boss, he left at six
It was, “Katie, bar the door”
She’d pull down that Navajo rug
And we’d spread it across the floor
I saw lightnin’ frame the sacred mountains
The wooin’ of the turtle doves
Just Iyin’ next to Katie
On that old Navajo rug
[Chorus]
[Verse 3]
Well I saw old Jack about a year ago
Said the place had burned to the ground
All he’d saved was an old bear tooth
And Katie, she left town
Well Katie got a souvenir too
Jack smiled as he spit out a big old plug
“Well you shoulda seen her coming through the smoke
“She was dragging that Navajo rug”
[Chorus]
[Verse 4]
So every time I cross the sacred mountains
And lightning jumps above
It always takes me back in time
To my long lost Katie love
You know everything keeps on a-moving
Everybody’s on the go
Hey, you don’t find things that last anymore
Like a hand-woven Navajo
Every single syllable counts. “Whiskey toast” is diner slang for rye toast so it’s an innocuous way to introduce the word whiskey. (Later on tobacco is mentioned in a similar offhand way, with Jack’s plug.) “Home fries / roadhouse coffee” is an artful songwriter’s version of the rhetorical device of antithesis. Your logical brain hears “home fries” and “roadhouse” as compound nouns and thinks of what they represent but hidden in them are the simpler opposing concepts “home” and “road.” The whole image resonates in a way we can’t quite put our finger on while introducing the theme of leaving home, living a life on the road with part joyous freedom and mournful rootlessness. (There is an instance of this technique that stands out to me in Traveling Wilbury’s “Handle With Care” : “daycare centers and night schools.” Yes, one thinks, truly these two things encompass all the absurd institutions of the modern world!) It took me a while to catch that the coffee that “burns up your insides” is foreshadowing the fiery destruction of the diner itself.
Imagine a song that said “I left home and went on the road and drank whiskey and used tobacco.” Those songs exist and they can be great. But look how well that imagery is socked in here, buried in the breakfast menu. Now imagine the next verse of the song says “I considered the elimination of Native American culture as I went along my way.” That song can’t exist. That’s a campus coffee shop open mic cringer.
Three Uses of the Knife is a David Mamet essay about narrative structure. It’s all over the map but the knife part is a useful meditation about how humans create narrative out of an infinite messy world. Confining a narrative to one actual object used in different ways can be liberating for the story. The object is used for one thing, then another, then another until you see all along what it was really representing. In fact, Mamet took the idea from songwriting and a knife in an old blues song. “The dramatist, the blues writer in us, seizes upon the knife as both embodying and witnessing the interchange, subtly changing its purpose through the course of the drama.” The Navajo Rug is a decoration, then a lovers’ bed, then a souvenir. After all is done we see that it was our proxy for the mournful loss… the personal and the national. A physical token of the lost lover and the loss of Native America.
Let’s go back to Jerry Jeff Walker. He grew up in upstate New York. He bounced out of the National Guard and bounced around in New York City. His most famous song, “Mr Bojangles,” is about an old southern dancer in a New Orleans drunk tank. He found his artistic home and greatest fame in Texas with the mid-70s outlaw country crowd. He got drunk. He got sober. He’s been everywhere. “Crosby” was the last name he was born with but he chose “Walker” for himself. “Keep on moving” is right there in his name. You can wander anywhere in America and find the place for you.
This is where I leave the rails a bit. The work of art that I really want to connect to Navajo Rug is Peace by Gene Wolfe. Peace is a masterpiece of a full-length novel with a lot going on but a big part of the overall narrative is constant loss, being the last of one’s kind, being a part of a culture that must inevitably end. The narrator of Peace is a white mid-century American man. The novel begins with his earliest remembrance: town grandees laughingly memorializing (or forging?) a crooked treaty with “the Indians” that gave the town its start. Throughout the story he returns to this founding myth and how the pre-Columbian past of America intersects with its present. I’ve seen Peace called a horror story but all of the horror happen off the page. It’s an unreliable narrator story but the narrator isn’t so much unreliable as elliptical. He leaves a lot out. People come and go, and we’re not quite sure where or how they went until the clues start piling up later. It’s a powerful way to drive a story when you want to call into question everything about the foundation that the narrator appears to be standing on. “I don’t know what happened to them or that relationship but I sure am lonely now,” is a rough summary of the narrator’s amiable lament. Sound familiar?
The key “storytelling cut” in Navajo Rug is between verses 2 and 3, when we go from a blooming love affair to a point (already a year in the past!) where the diner has burned and Katie is gone. The narrator doesn’t tell us how the affair ended but we do get a clue from the fact that Katie cared enough to go into the fire to retrieve the rug. It certainly sounds like it meant something to her. This interplay between the narrator saying outright “Oh my long lost love, whatever became of you?” while eliding the actual breakup and dropping clues that it probably was his fault reminds me a lot of Peace. Similarly he laments “Everybody’s on the go…” but the narrator clearly has made travel a big part of his own life since he’s often “crossing the sacred mountains.” (“Crossing the sacred mountains” is a great phrase. It’s a real place in the American West, it brings to mind the Native Americans who actually lived its sacredness and a lonely truck driver’s appropriation of that history and it’s an allusion to death.)
You don’t have to be stuck where you’re born, you can wander anywhere in America, you can make a life out of wandering, but when you look back why does it feel like no relationship in your life has lasted? There’s so much space to build the things you want on the land that was cleared of those who lived here before, but why is it so hard to build anything that lasts? As we look forward is there any different possible fate for this civilization than all the others that have come and gone? Is everything destined to burn to the ground? You can’t look head on at these questions. This song is so great because it naturally buries all this uneasiness in a “simple” tale of love found and lost. The narrator can’t quite face up to his own story. How could he? How can anyone? All that pain leaks through into the cheery tune with the perfect squared-off Texas beat. Jerry Jeff Walker might have better songs but none so perfect.
Now that I typed all this out I feel like some percentage of people will say “You donkey, of course a song called ‘Navajo Rug’ is going to deal with Native America in some way!” And another group will say “You donkey, outlaw king Jerry Jeff freakin Walker wasn’t out there making woke cultural relativistic music in the 1980s!” I’m clearly in the remainder, since it took me many times listening to it and asking “Why is this song so effortlessly compelling?” In short, it masters classic country themes and musical vocabulary using songwriting that works with an array of poetic and narrative devices, building from the singer’s charisma and delivery to ultimately encompass a multi-layered tragic theme literally as big as the West. Not much really.
Hat tips to this piece by Brian Phillips which introduced me to Gene Wolfe, and the blog The Kind of Face You Hate which finally nudged me to actually read Peace and every other novel I could find of Wolfe’s. Incidentally, why is Peace called Peace? Well… Rest in Peace, Jerry Jeff Walker.