Lyr Add: Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow
From: Q (Frank Staplin)
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 12:37 PM

"Bonnie Parker's "Story of Bonnie and Clyde" was posted in thread 43122: Badman Ballads
(Later called "Trail's End")

Other poems by her here:
Poems of Bonnie Parker

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 12:27 PM

Bonny & Clyde - where history & folklore assume a vivid enough partnership. Actually, this is a distant cousin of a goodnight ballad, containing a grim prophecy of their ultimate undoing however so bleak the rather Kipling-esque notions contained therein; echoes of A Truthful Song perhaps? Worth a thought anyway....

Subject: Lyr Add: Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow
From: Jack Blandiver
Date: 04 Jun 09 - 06:54 AM

Rapunzel's lately set Bonnie Parker's poem Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow to her own tune, self-accompanied on her 5-string. The effect, I think, is deeply moving on various levels. Listen to it at her Myspace page (though the folk process is already at work on the lyrics!):

http://www.myspace.com/rachelmccarron

The words:

Outlaws - Billy the Kid & Clyde Barrow
by Bonnie Parker

Billy rode on a pinto horse
Billy the Kid I mean
And he met Clyde Barrow riding
In a little gray machine

Billy drew his bridle rein
And Barrow stopped his car
And the dead man talked to the living man
Under the morning star

Billy said to the Barrow boy
Is this the way you ride
In a car that does it's ninety per
Machine guns at each side?

I only had my pinto horse
And my six-gun tried and true
I could shoot but they got me
And someday they will get you!

For the men who live like you and me
Are playing a losing game
And the way we shoot, or the way we ride
Is all about the same

And the like of us may never hope
For death to set us free
For the living are always after you
And the dead are after me

Then out of the East arose the sound
Of hoof-beats with the dawn
And Billy pulled his rein and said
I must be moving on

And out of the West came the glare of a light
And the drone of a motor's song
And Barrow set his foot on the gas
And shouted back, "So long"

So into the East, Clyde Barrow rode
And Billy, into the West
The living man who can know no peace
And the dead who can know no rest