"Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain" by Fred Rose
Singalong 012: Songs that save your life
“In the twilight glow I see her / Blue eyes cryin' in the rain / When we kissed goodbye and parted / I knew we'd never meet again”
In America we tend to like songs where love is absent. As in “over”, in the past, forever broken. Gone somehow.
It can be distant and unattainable, or maybe it’s currently happening and not working out. But for whatever reason, the love must be remote. A present, tender, functioning love might be what people want, but we seem to prefer songs that emphasize the absence, betrayal, or unviability of love.
In America, love must forever be the dream. Not the reality.
“Love is like a dyin' ember”
In the liner notes to a Mose Allison compilation CD which I no longer possess (appropriately called “Allison Wonderland”), Irwin Chusid’s liner notes mention a story Mose liked to tell about an anthropologist in the Southwestern U.S. visiting a Hopi tribe. The learned observer notices that most of the tribal culture - songs, dances, art - all of it is about water. All they celebrate, all they sing about is water. When the anthropologist asks one of the elders why this is, the elder replies [paraphrasing] “We sing about water because we live in the desert, and water is scarce here. Water is what we have the least of, so that’s what we sing about. But allow me to ask, sir: why do you Americans sing so many songs about love?”
It’s been decades since I gazed upon this anecdote while listening to Parchman Farm.
(It’s also been at least a decade since I dropped off my entire CD collection at my friend Ezra’s house in a fit of hopefulness about the Internet. Ezra keeps the hard copies, and over time he’s proved himself the smarter one. Because so many records I find myself searching for, records I’ve bought in the past, which still kick around in my psyche, are not only absent from streaming services but are not even listed anywhere. But Ezra’s still got em, and he still listens.)
“Only memories remain”
“Blue Eyes” had many renditions before the immortal Willie cut. I’m partial to Hank’s, and perhaps I have no business attempting one of my own. But we’re out here. Love is still so remote for so many.
This is not a whiny breakup song by a young indie sprite. The monumental perfection of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” defies description. It’s a song that comes to us from the America of 1946, a period of wholesale separation of couples. Folks in this generation had seen eight million military personnel deployed to faraway war campaigns, and they were on their way home. Starting to pick up the pieces. These Americans laid the ground for a post-war boom in the 50’s, but in 1946 things were still pretty raw.
And many of them returned to find that their love had indeed been imaginary. Some were furiously having babies, others hadn’t come home at all.
For many, a melody was all that kept them from an early exit.
“Through the ages I'll remember / Blue eyes cryin' in the rain”
The writer, Fred Rose, was a true professional. One of Nashville’s Founding Fathers, the first three inductees to the Country Music Hall of Fame (with Jimmie Rodgers and a guy named Hank). He’d done stints on Tin Pan Alley and in Hollywood before settling back in Nashville. And you can draw a line straight from “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” to “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”: songs that can withstand any number of versions, interpretations and added verses but remain recognizable.
They are crystals. The line loses focus on the way to “Red Solo Cup”, but music is not an either/or and I won’t idealize life in the 40s. They certainly had plenty of plastic songs back then, just like we still write songs that save lives today. But “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” is a song that can literally stop time.
I sang it a few weeks ago to a stressed-out friend who was swallowing some deep grief while raising a child and navigating an alpha maze of first-world problems. It helped her put down the burden for just a minute. She cried her eyes out, thanking me as if I’d just handed her a glass of water in the desert. I live for those moments.
“Some day when we meet up yonder / We'll stroll hand in hand again / In a land that knows no partin' / Blue eyes cryin' in the rain”
After 2008 I had no home, no health care and no love. Now I have all three, but in order to get out of the gutter I had to make my home inside songs like this one for much longer than was comfortable. I had to let them save my life.