Bob Dylan, “Brownsville Girl”

Videos by American Songwriter

The notion that the ‘80s was a lost decade for Bob Dylan was somewhat misleading. The great stuff was still there; you just had to search a little harder for it. For example, 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded is generally considered one of the nadirs of his career, a listless collection of half-baked covers and tossed-off originals. Yet sitting in the midst of the mediocrity on the album is the epic “Brownsville Girl,” a song about lost love, unreliable memories and, in truly idiosyncratic, Dylanesque fashion, Gregory Peck.

Dylan composed the song with playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who was once part of Bob’s Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-70’s. Shepard recalled the process in a 2004 Village Voice interview. “With Dylan you’re continuing on this hunt for what he’s after, who he is, this continual mystery about his identity,” Shepard remembered. “He had that little snatch of a chorus and melody lines that he’d laid out. He had ’em on tape and then he would play them on guitar. The way I found my way into it with him was to follow this story that started to evolve. All these characters started to pop into the story. Traveling around, visiting these characters, tracking people down.”

Peck plays a tangential role in the song as the lead actor of a film that the narrator is seemingly standing in line to watch. Although Dylan never names the movie and his character’s foggy memory clouds the picture, 1950’s The Gunfighter is widely believed to be the movie within the song. The film serves as a jumping-off point for the narrator to remember a road trip with a mystery woman, all while addressing the titular female, the one who truly owns his heart.

There’s also a side trip to the home of Henry Porter, whom we never get to actually meet and may not even be Henry Porter. Just to confuse things even more, there’s a point where the narrator seems to actually enter the film, getting embroiled in a shootout and a court case along the way. And it all winds up with him still standing there in line, seventeen verses having gone by without the character having moved an inch.

So what holds it all together? Dylan’s incredible performance, for one, as he spits out overstuffed lines and never loses touch with his character’s world-weary, wounded heart. The memorable lines written by Dylan and Shepard also keep things moving along, like when Ruby, the woman waiting on the mysterious Henry Porter, muses, “Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.” Or when the narrator, when asked how far he’s going, answers, “We’re going all the way ’till the wheels fall off and burn/’Til the sun peels the paint and the seat covers fade and the water moccasin dies.”

Underlying all that is the narrator’s undying affection for the “Brownsville Girl,” which he can’t escape no matter how far he drives or how many movies he sees. In the end, Gregory Peck takes a bullet in the back and the narrator is left remembering a better time, one “before the stars were torn down.”

Like so many Dylan songs, this 11-minute behemoth is profound enough for listeners to take a deep dive into its many intricacies and quirks. Yet Bob’s charisma carries you through at first listen even before you have any clue who’s doing what to whom or if any of it adds up. Rumors abounded at the start of this decade that “Brownsville Girl” might get turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. But Dylan and Shepard’s original creation, so weird and wonderful, creates a movie in our minds for which anyone would willingly stand in line.

Read the lyrics. 

Rhiannon Giddens: The Indivisible Sound