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Bronx Lullabye/Smugglers Waltz Lyrics
Daggers of moonlight
Murder the sheets
And the stink of a four dollar room
And Daddy's gone a hunting
For a dime bag schoolboy
Tied up with a yellow balloon
So hush little baby, Daddy must go
I cover you up with a blanket of snow
By the time I make Jersey
You'll be in heaven
In a pretty blue shoe box I know
So sing a song of ten grand
With a pocket full of dough
And I can't take you to Baltimore
Wake God up in Heaven
Have him look down below
There's a little lost angel
Blooming in the snow
Murder the sheets
And the stink of a four dollar room
And Daddy's gone a hunting
For a dime bag schoolboy
Tied up with a yellow balloon
I cover you up with a blanket of snow
By the time I make Jersey
You'll be in heaven
In a pretty blue shoe box I know
With a pocket full of dough
And I can't take you to Baltimore
Wake God up in Heaven
Have him look down below
There's a little lost angel
Blooming in the snow
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This is a very sad song. I think it's about a father singing to his murdered son, he buried the body (by himself or a funeral) and he's going after the murder.
The protaganist is merely drug addled looking for a fix. Between schoolboy (coke) and snow (heroin) ... there is not much ambiguity. I do not think this is about a son. Daddy and his lost little angel are all metaphors for an adult relationship that has nowhere to go.
This is the saddest damn song of all time.
The lyrics aren't right. It's: For a dime bag of schoolboy Tied up with a yellow balloon
So he is not hunting for a person. He is a drug addict looking for a dimebag of cocaine (schoolboy is slang for coke) Balloons are also used to contain illegal narcotics.
I can only guess about the rest of the song. Maybe in his drug induced state he accidently killed his son (downed in bath tub, starved, etc)
And I agree. It's one of the saddest song ever. Equally sad is The Tragically Hip's Fiddler's Green.
Maybe when he wrote it he was thinking about a hitman who goes to New York City to murder a young drug dealer who fell out of line with a drug lord, or something like that - in that case maybe going out for a dime bag means the hitman is going to buy drugs from the dealer in order to get close and then do the hit - if so - then going out for a 'dime bag of schoolboy' seems to have a secondary allusion to the dealer himself. That just leaves 'pretty blue shoe box' which maybe is a body bag, city-morgue coffin, city-morgue hearse, ambulance, etc.. None which seem to quite fit "pretty blue shoe box" too well.. Seems like there are allusions to him being the father of the dealer - but seems more to me like it's just an allusion to the age difference - not to actual blood relation..
Another Tom Waits murder ballad. With murder foreshadowed in the first lines, the drug-addicted, drug-dealing father first leaves his baby alone in a hotel room while he goes out to score. Then he leaves the baby to die out in the snow since you obviously can't take a baby along to a 10-grand drug deal in Baltimore. Chilling, not the least because of how sweetly it's sung.