Highwayman (1985)

I guess I’m on a Chips Moman binge. This one has to be the greatest all-star quartet ever assembled. Cash, Nelson, Jennings, Kristofferson. To hear all four major league voices take a turn on each song accompanied by Mickey Raphael on harp seems like almost too much of a good thing.

“The Last Cowboy Song” has that nostalgic, Proustian feel. The four old cowboys seem to be singing at their own funeral.

Cindy Walker’s “Jim, I Wore a Tie Today” tells a story about a cowboy’s funeral.

The Highwaymen take the opportunity to cry on Johnny Cash’s “Big River.” “I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry.” One cowboy crying isn’t bad enough, we have four, that’s eight eyes. It reminds me of the courtly love tradition and Petrarch where the men wear themselves out crying over unattainable women. The theme of the river, like the road, like time, always moving. This one’s made of tears, though, and it takes their memories down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Willie and Johnny are wry as ever when they sing “They’re taking good care of me committed to Parkview.”

The chorus on “Desperados Waiting for a Train” is a bit much. But the irony of desperados waiting, standing still, reminds me of “Still is Still Moving to Me.”

Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)” is an interesting choice with a little flamenco touch.

If you have to be on the “Welfare Line,” you want these guys and Mickey Raphael to keep your spirits up. Who else can make the welfare line sound like an exciting, cool place to be? This tune bounces with the drums, bass, and harp.

Not sure Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” needed re-making, but the song fits thematically, nostalgically. “She swore that it would never end.” And yet time just slipped away. That elusive promise of eternity. “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” I wish I didn’t know about time. I wish I still believed it didn’t apply to me. But “the years rolled slowly past.” I’d actually like to hear Willie sing this one solo. He interprets it in an interesting way.

Listening to “The Twentieth Century is Almost Over” in 2010 I can’t shake the funny feeling that time slips away. “Where in the world did the twentieth century go? I swear it was there just a minute ago.” Willie has upped the ante here. An entire century, 100 years, have slipped away, been misplaced, lost. “Father time is a rumbling and a rapping…everyone is waiting for something to happen.” Time itself, personified, makes an appearance in this John Prine song. History itself cannot stand up to time. It, too, is defenseless.