geoMP3 of the Week: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot Does “The South Coast”
This week it’s Ramblin’ Jack Elliot’s jagged version of “The South Coast,” by Lillian Bos Ross, Sam Eskin, Richard Dehr & Frank Miller. This song has a complicated history, I hear, involving quite a bit of postprocessing of the original by other authors and plenty of fine-tuning by its many singers over the years. To the point, I suspect, that “authorship” is a little vague on this one. Unfortunately, most of this information is unsubstantiated and uncredited, so I won’t repeat it. I do know that Ramblin’ Jack rips into this one pretty well and the result is that a soft-handed lilly-white like me can even start to feel the desolation and harshness and terror and beauty of El Sur at a time before there was much settlement at all.
The song was built from a poem written in 1926, 11 years before the opening of the Coast Highway in 1937, and therefore at a time when most of the area was inaccessible to vehicular traffic (1). And so goes the story:
A man named Lonjano de Castro wins a wife in a card game in Jolon, California, the nearest town to his Monterey homestead that he no doubt inherited from his Spanish grandee father. de Castro rides 40 miles to Jolon every Friday for some grub and to pick up his mail. Ramblin’ Jack describes the ride home that night:
Her arms had to tighten around me
As we rode up the hills from the south.
But no word did I get from her that day
Nor a kiss from her pretty red mouth.
“Up the hills” is fine, and “twinkled over the coast” would make it easy to suggest that de Castro and his bride rode the Nacimiento Trail (now the Nacimiento-Fergessuon Rd.), but “from the south” makes that a little problematic (Nacimiento goes east-west, not very north at all). At any rate, note here that the wife isn’t thrilled.
We got to my cabin at twilight
The stars twinkled over the coast.
She soon loved the orchard, the valley
But I knew she loved me the most.
Suddenly the wife is down with it, suggesting to most just that — despite the circumstance — the beauty of Big Sur and the South Coast wins over the young bride and all is well. Others prefer to read “I knew she loved me the most” as a yearning delusion by the narrator cowboy. But soon the cowboy gets injured in a landslide, a nod toward a conclusion where the wildness of the land and its resistance to settlement and safety is the victor. And “just like lightning” the wife saddles up a horse and lights out for Jolon:
She saddled up Buck just like lightning
And rode out through the night to Jolon.
A lion screamed in the barranca;
Buck bolted and fell on a slide.
My young wife lay dead in the moonlight;
My heart died that night with my bride.
They buried her out in the orchard.
They carried me out to Jolon.
I lost my Chiquita, my nino;
I’m an old broken man, all alone.
The cabin still stands on the hillside,
Its doors open wide to the rain;
But the cradle and my heart are empty,
And I never can go there again.
Oh, the south Coast is a wild coast and lonely.
You might win in a game at Jolon.
But the lion still rules the barranca
And a man there is always alone.
Alright, so now the wife has died, also by virtue of an untameable natural foe, and the man has become the icon of his empty, deserted Monterey homestead (or vice versa). But the interesting reading here goes that the wife found the accident that incapacitated her husband as an escape attempt and was fleeing to Jolon.
Well, apparently Bos Ross’ novel The Stranger features a similar forced-union scenario wherein the heroine actually does grow to her new home. So maybe, maybe not. Bos Ross is indeed best-known as a Big Sur author, by the way. She and her sculptor husband, Harry Dick (hm, I thought being named “Travis” would be unpalatable) moved to Livermore Ledge (now part of the John Little State Reserve), where she lived in a small cabin and wrote several books that were set in the Big Sur region. (2)
And if you made it this far, you deserve…
“The South Coast” by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot (at Whelan’s, Dublin, in May of 2006).
kml (network link to all geoMP3s of the week)
(1) Chapter “Jeffers Country Revisited: Beauty Without Price,” Richard Kohlman Hughey and Boon Hughey in Of Poems and Landscapes, Maps and Placenames by Robert J. Brophy [http://www.jeffers.org/newsletters/Number_098_099.pdf]
(2) “Corridor Intrinsic Qualities Inventory Historic Qualities Summary Report,” Prepared for Caltrans District 5 by JRP Historical Consulting Services, November 2001 [http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist05/projects/bigsur/inventory_reports/historic_qualities_summary.pdf]
