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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Escapist

February 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Back to Terry’s five questions: “If you had to live in a song, what would it be?”


A song where everything’s still the same:

Everybody’s had a few

Now they’re talking about who knows who

I’m going back to the Crescent City

Where everything’s still the same

This town has said what it has to say

Now I’m after that back highway

And the longest bridge

I’ve ever crossed over Pontchartrain

Tu le ton temps that’s what we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister, me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

Mama lives in Mandeville

I can hardly wait until

I can hear my Zydeco

and laissez le bon ton roulet

And take rides in open cars

My brother knows where the best bars are

Let’s see how these blues’ll do

in the town where the good times stay

Tu le ton temps that’s all we say

We used to dance the night away

Me and my sister me and my brother

We used to walk down by the river

That’s Lucinda Williams’ “Crescent City.” The appeal of this song–aside from the gorgeous fiddle–is how the Crescent City and environs are static, but alive: full of walking, driving, gossip, dancing. And just in case all that activity isn’t enough to keep things from getting stale, the song contains the outside space of wherever the narrator is returning from.


Of course, everything in “Crescent City” is really just in the narrator’s head–the song takes place while she’s on the road home. Yet the scenes she imagines are so vivid (helped out by that fiddle), it’s easy to forget that they’re only imagined. In this, the song has something in common with a poem so famous, it’s hard to hear freshly:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing daffodils;

Along the lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.


The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee;

A poet could not but be gay

In such a laughing company.

I gazed, and gazed, but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought–


For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Before the standard-bearers get their noses all out of joint over the comparison, let me state that I am not putting Lucinda on the same artistic plane as Bill. (Now I’ll probably hear from the people who think Wordsworth suffers from the comparison!) I’m just pointing out that the song and the poem are each about the memory of their apparent subject. But they both make their remembered scenes so vivid that you easily forget they’re really about the reveries of a woman behind the wheel of a car and a guy on a couch.


My runner-up is David Bowie’s “Kooks.”

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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