juliet's tomb

Brownsville Girl & Intertextuality

12/26 2023

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice and I don't remember who I was or where I was bound, all I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck and he wore a gun and he was shot in the back. Seems like a long time ago long before the stars were torn down.

Brownsville Girl is one of the oddest and most ridiculous songs in Dylan's oeuvre. A confused retelling of some obscure Gregory Peck movie and a reminiscing of lost love, all told by a bombastic 80s arrangement that is positively over the top [in all the right ways]. Recently I watched the movie in question, the 1950s western The Gunfighter (or most of it anyways, I can't remember), and I realized that there is some really interesting intertextuality going on in Brownsville Girl. I have previously written on Dylan and his relationship with intertextuality in his work here, but we can use the very simplified notion of using something old to create something new by deliberate reference to a previous work. In other words, a kind of allusion but which creates new meaning in virtue of the meaning of the original work. Consider the analysis of Joyce's Ulysses being a retelling of The Odyssey, in that case knowing the story of Odysseus enriches the story in a way that simple allusion doesn't.

The first element I noticed was the relationship between the insider and outsider in The Gunfighter and the connection to the song. There's an interesting quote from an interview that Dylan did at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1991 (by Paul Zollo) where he details his creative process:

Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that [Positively 4th street] but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.

This is a theme that you can see in many of his songs, sometimes explicitly (e.g. Ballad of a thin man), sometimes implicitly (e.g. Highlands). However, in Brownsville Girl, we are instead presented this theme through the lens of epistemological uncertainty. In The Gunfighter Gregory Peck plays a gunslinger named Johnny Ringo who is the fastest gun in the West, leading to numerous young men full of hubris challenging him and subsequently dying to Ringo's quick draw. Johnny Ringo is (in-)famous and wherever he goes he can never fit in, people either staring at him like an exhibit or avoiding him like the plague. He is always an outsider trying to look in even though he knows that his reputation will always precede him. I don't think it's that far out there to suggest that this can be seen as also commenting on the effect that fame has on a person in modern day America. He (the narrator [i.e. Dylan] in Brownsville Girl¹/Ringo) is revered for their work, espoused as being the best at something, but in virtue of that --- even if it is something that they originally wanted --- they are now paradoxically unable to achieve that. Johnny Ringo doesn't want to be an (in-)famous gunslinger, he only wants to make up with his girl that lives in Cayenne. The narrator in Brownsville Girl doesn't want to wait in the rain to watch a movie that he has maybe already watched before, he is reminiscing about a girl, which we could see as Dylan reminiscing about time (and love) lost, to a time that is forever lost even though the evidence may remain (the movie).

Secondly, and perhaps most interestingly, is the part facts has to play with the story being told. In Brownsville Girl the narrator is unsure of many of the details of both the movie and the story being told in the song which play off each other. For Johnny Ringo it doesn't matter whether or not the facts corroborate his story in who drew first, he is automatically guilty. In Brownsville Girl we have somebody accusing the narrator for a crime he didn't commit, the girl testifies to clear his name, and him being freed, but ultimately concluding with the skeptical "You always said people don't do what they believe in they just do what's most convenient then they repent." The temporal aspects of the song of course emphasize this. In which order does the narrative take place in the song? Who knows, and does it really matter? Just like with Johnny Ringo the facts doesn't really matter in the end, what matters is that Johnny Ringo wants to see his girl and son, and the narrator in the Brownsville Girl is aching for something that he cannot have.

While Brownsville Girl is fantastically silly and (I think) not meant to be taken entirely seriously (life is too short anyways), these aspects of intertextuality, the relationship between fame and motivation and epistemological doubt regarding facts and narrative, are too interesting to pass up --- especially since they align so well with the movie that it refers to. And who knows who's idea it was, Sam Shephard's or Dylan's, but just like the song says: does it even matter in the end? Because that is how the world works whether or not that is fair or not. Or like Johnny Ringo says in his dying breath, "I want you to go on ... see what it means."