I can understand how, from Dave's modern UK perspective, Summer Wages might seem to be a generic country hurtin' song. But M. Ted has it right--to someone like me the song is completely imbued with sub-text pertaining to a certain time and place--British Columbia circa 1960. This is the other side of the coin Foolestroupe alluded to above--if a lyric is sufficiently vague you can read into it your own profundities. Jobs, bars, hookers, trees, heartaches--sure, they got 'em everywhere. But I know exactly what jobs the narrator might have been working at, I know the view out the bus window as he rolls on to Vancouver, I've lived beside the fog-bound straits, I know the names of the Main Street hotels which housed the beer parlours. I know why the hooker is standing at the door instead of, for instance, sitting at the bar. Women weren't allowed in and there was no bar to sit at or even stand at in a beer parlour. You drank your beer sitting down or they threw you out, and I mean threw, not asked you to leave. These are not generic references to me, they are precise, and Summer Wages is one of the only songs I know which evokes those particularities. However the song is great not because it's specific to a time and place but because, as Don said, it is so well crafted that hearing it is almost like seeing a movie.