ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE 2010 DELPHI RISING ALBUM "FOR GRANTED."
I actually started writing the lyrics to this in the early '80s, after a trip some friends and I made to Big Bend National Park, where we waded across the Rio Grande to buy another bottle of mezcal in Boquillas, Mexico. Later that same decade, I got some more lyrics from a somewhat-sordid trip to Nuevo Laredo that me and my no-good friends made. But in the subsequent years, I was just never able to find the angle to finish writing the words to match the music I already had in my head for it. I knew I wanted it to have the flavor of some of those oblique Dylan ballads about harrowing expeditions with vague goals (eg. "Isis").
Fast forward to 2008, when (inspired by all the bad shit I saw on the news as US right wing regression marched boldly ever-onward), I finally sat down and found a path to finishing it. But it wasn't recorded until a couple of years later, when I talked the band I was in at the time into giving it a crack.....after which the song ended up on the one album that band put out.
The original version has full instrumentation, and it was sung by Vic Ramirez. But I always wanted to take a crack at singing it myself, and so decided to record it for this new album in a very stripped-back style, as if I was singing it in one of the local cantinas here in San Miguel, with just my nylon-string guitar.
On May 27, we cinched up the bags and turned south in the hot Texas wind;
Juan Vasquez hung back and he said with a grin, “My old friend, so we do this again?”.
And we rode through the night, then laid up in the day in a gulch just this side of Pearsall;
And Mono sang love songs while deep in mescal, but somehow we avoided patrols.
I’d dreamed of betrayal and dark rain approaching and sensing erosion of time;
So I sent out the word to our far-scattered band for some work (with some fun on the side).
We’d all been here before, through the lies and the war, and the speeches of men steeped in gall;
And some of us think of the way things have gone, and then some of us don’t think at all.
Down at The Pagoda, the bottles lay stacked and the night was too close to the day;
Hidalgo and Boni came down from upstairs with no money and not much to say;
But another girl looked as tall Boni walked by, then she grabbed him where business is done;
So he traded his jacket with a wink and a smile and went back for more use of his gun.
When light rimmed the mountains, we crawled from the bar; Federales, they drove us from town;
And Mono and Vasquez, they dragged Willie out, with Hidalgo nowhere to be found.
And back at the border, we looked worse for wear, but the guard barely opened his eyes;
“We all come from Sweden,” I said with a grin, and that hombre, he waved us on by!
In Piedras Negras, we met with Morales to pick up the primer and cord;
Juan Vasquez worked out on Morales a bit so that he’d be a man of his word.
In the desert, their camp was sure not hard to find, with the lights and the dogs and the wire;
But Mono crept through like a smoke in the night, and the whole damn thing blossomed in fire!
Northwest through El Moral and on past Jimenez we followed the river through June;
Got soaked in the crossings, and dry in the walking, and laid low beneath too much moon.
They sent out the choppers, and doubled patrols, but there was not a trace to be found;
We feasted on catfish beside Amistad, and slept in mesquite far from towns.
Willie went out as the sun burned away, to scout out some difficult ground;
When he got back from Langtry, his face had gone crooked and we had to help our friend sit down;
The smell was all wrong, but he’d crept slowly on, and saw 26 shapes up ahead;
When he brought his light in, “Fortune Favors the Bold” was carved in the chests of the dead.
Our faces turned grim as we set out again, ‘cross the Sierra del Carmen so dry;
Now we rode through the open, ‘cause everyone knows that nobody comes through this alive;
The road to Boquillas was splattered in blood and the stares of men who don’t look back;
And though our own band felt we tread the right path, still the writing was faint on the map.
The bites and the stings may not bring the beast down, and a man can’t hold back the high tide;
But when history’s written, please hold back a page for the men who were willing to try.
Called "the quintessential Austin DIY artist" by famed local disc jockey Charlie Martin , Walter Ehresman was an eccentric
presence in the Austin music scene from the '80s until his 2015 move to Mexico. A prolific songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and recording artist...and a restless musical spirit, always looking for something new, expressed with fearlessly honest, socially-conscious lyrics....more
Three renditions of “Snowflakes in July” explore all aspects of the song’s stunning beauty, including a mind-blowing 17-minute live version. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 15, 2020
