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Old America
Tom Russell
Popularity ยท Low
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๐ฌ๐ง English ยท Original
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Yeah, those angels of mercy used to sing
And beg down in Pershing Square, L.A.
Voices that haunted me and still do
Lost nightmare Jesus sounds coming out of the
Coins rattling in a cup from two blind ladies
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I was born in the City of Angels in the late 1940s
Down on Hope Street near Pershing Square
And Clifton's Cafeteria and the Pantry
And all them old strip joints on Fifth and Main
You know, tonight, White Fury and her twin .44s
Charles Bukowski territory
Beat outsider America and the music that's been lost from that time
Taken off the radios
You had to have been there
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The backdrop is MacArthur Park and
Hollywood Court Apartments and racetracks
The old America when music still resonated through nightclubs
People gambled and drank and screwed and smoked
People went down to the border and sipped
Highballs and cocktails and went to the bullfights
The old America where the big guilt and political
Correctness and the chain stores hadn't sunk in so deep
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I thought, you know, the best person to read
These memories would have been Little Jack Horton
He was a circus midget who actually used
To drink with Bukowski back in the 1950s
Then I find out Little Jack Horton's still
Alive and living in Giddtown, Florida
With all the old-time carnies and circus people
So why the hell do we need any fake Hollywood tough guys here?
Here today, gone tomorrow boys in masks, flimflammers, magazine faces
We don't need 'em
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Little Jack Horton was the king of the carnival
The voice of the great American midway
A voice that sounds like Ukulele Ike on laughing gas, the real thing
He's been shot out of cannons, he did
The pass of death on a Shetland pony
He rode the four walls of eternity on a motorcycle
Appeared in movies like The Terror of Tiny
Town and One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando
And he wrote poetry
This is a true American voice from
The sawdust backlots of the old world
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I saw Little Jack a little while ago, gave him
Some cassette tapes and a cheap cassette recorder
And asked him to read some of these pages on Charles Bukowski memories
Real low-fidelity Americana, the way it used to be
Ladies and gentlemen, it's matinee time
Here's Little Jack Horton
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