Brown-Eyed Woman

Yeah, definitely talking about prohibition, bootleggin' and all that. I'm aghast at the lack of passion in the comments about this song. This is a song that reminisces on a distinctly American tale in a bygone era (gone are the days when the ox fall down...). Today a Deere does all that nonsense for ya. Yay progress.

Jack Jones is at the center of the story in this song. He is a simple, hard working man (take up the yoke and plow the fields around). And in this simple context the man gets a little attention from the ladies (... the ladies said please, gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me) and starts a family. Though really, the "gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me line" also speaks to his youth. A youth that evaporated along with the bygone era, and you realize that the old man is moving from this life to the next (and it looks like the old man is getting on). That simpler time is dying with him, all respects....

And so this song becomes a retrospective of this American, early 20th-century everyman's life, told from his son's perspective. And as the son reflects on that life, it is impossible to segregate that life from the time and place in which it was lived. Prohibition, the Depression, America, the infancy of modern technology all play a role.

The beauty of this song is the simplicity of the life it describes. A man tills his land and sews seeds. He is a part of a large family - a necessity, as mortality rates are a bit higher back in the day (Delilah Jones was the mother of twins, two times over and the rest were sins). And a large family serves an agrarian purpose or lifestyle. Delilah enters the tale at this point, apparently a force of her own. She has the brood, half of it out of wedlock. Jones's brown-eyed woman passes when a cabin collapses under the weight of snow in the wilderness, and the song says that part of Jack Jones's essences leaves him that day. His imperfect love for an imperfect woman is that powerful. Plus this drives home the fact that hardship is never far away.

The son is taught the art of bootlegging (I cut hickory just to fire the still, drink down a bottle and be ready to kill). This is another romanticized aspect of Americana. Alcohol is legal today, but it's in all of us Americans to bristle at authority, and we love to do things our own way. A whiskey still is thus a damn fine thing. Some things never change.

The son registers all this as he looks backwards, some time in the future when Jack Jones is on the brink of succumbing to old age, and it impossible to look back on his life without remembering the time that that life spanned, and all that took place in and around it.

Early twentieth-century America is a place that would be largely foreign to us today. Both It's simplicity and our "advancement" are a blessing and a curse. This song, in my opinion, touches on all that and is about more elemental humanism and our agrarian roots. It is a very distinctly American folk song.

I'd love to see affirmation or contention of my assertions. Feel free to comment!!!