Row Jimmy

Older incarnations of this blog had songs pulled from YT as a regular feature (one day I might even get round to tagging them). Sometimes there'd be brief commentary, most times not. This morning I had the idea of using this space to annotate some more music, in the hope that my favourite elusive mythical beast, the Actual Blog Visitor, might discover something they liked. Seems a harmless enough activity for a Sunday night. Seems a common way to go, even.

"Row Jimmy" appeared on the Grateful Dead's Wake of the Flood album, which along with various other Dead albums, and a smattering of prog and Motown soul, provided much of the backing track to a goodly chunk of my unspent, bedroom-bound, lightly sozzled adolescence. Forty-odd years later, I still like both the song and the album.

At that time, the meaning and reference of the lyrics of Row Jimmy seemed fairly obvious to me, apart from the cryptic middle 8. Since then, courtesy the Internet, I've discovered that my naive teenage interpretation is endorsed by precisely no one else, and certainly not by the lyricist, Robert Hunter. However, there doesn't seem to be a canonical, coherent alternative, so I'm sticking to my fanciful "antebellum Mississippi" version. Here's a short extract from where I got it from:

“I see a light a-comin’ roun’ de p’int bymeby, so I wade’ in en shove’ a log ahead o’ me en swum more’n half way acrost de river, en got in ’mongst de drift-wood, en kep’ my head down low, en kinder swum agin de current tell de raff come along. Den I swum to de stern uv it en tuck a-holt. It clouded up en ’uz pooty dark for a little while. So I clumb up en laid down on de planks. De men ’uz all ’way yonder in de middle, whah de lantern wuz. De river wuz a-risin’, en dey wuz a good current; so I reck’n’d ’at by fo’ in de mawnin’ I’d be twenty-five mile down de river, en den I’d slip in jis b’fo’ daylight en swim asho’, en take to de woods on de Illinois side."

Attentive readers will recognise the accents of Jim, the escaping slave in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, describing the first stage of his bid for freedom. I'd read this book a few years before I came across the Dead, but still had it fresh in my mind, and it seemed to me plain enough that the Jimmy of the song title was this Jim, or someone very like him, and the "rowing" of the chorus was his method of escape (OK, so you don't "row" a raft. A mere quibble, if you'd asked me). The detail fell into place easily enough:

Julie catch a rabbit by his hair
Come back steppin' like to walk on air:
"Get back home where you belong
and don't you run off no more!"

I'm not sure there's a Julie in Huckleberry Finn, though there is a Judith. Maybe Miss Watson, Jim's "owner", was called Julie? At any rate, here she catches Jim, or another slave - the figurative "rabbit" - in an earlier escape bid, and tells him to get back home and not run off no more.

Don't hang your head let the two-time roll
Grass shack nailed to a pine wood floor
Ask the time - "Baby I don't know:
Come back later, gonna let it show"

I tended to vacillate between the speaker, here and passim, being Jim talking to himself, or being a sympathetic third party (someone like Huck, or Tom): it didn't seem to matter much. "Don't hang your head" : try not to look guilty while you're planning your next escape bid. "Let the two-time roll": practise dissembling. "Grass shack": Jim's current accommodation. He needs to know the time as part of his carefully devised plan: his interlocutor doesn't know, but promises to give him a signal when the moment is right to head down the river bank.

And I say row, Jimmy row
Gonna get there? I don't know
Seems a common way to go
Get down and row, row, row, row, row

Self explanatory. "There", presumably the North, and freedom.

Here's a half a dollar if you dare
double twist when you hit the air
Look at Julie down below
the levee doin' the do-pas-o

A benefactor has given Jim money to help him in his escape attempt. He has to swim out (as in the book), and perform an evasive manoeuvre in the water ("double twist") when he comes up for air, in case anyone tries to shoot him. Before he can make it to the river, he finds himself peering from a wood above the riverbank, looking down on the townspeople, including Julie, crowded around the levee, almost as if there was a country dance (do paso) going on there (I think do paso is a contraction of dos pasos, which would be a two-step, though in archaic Spanish it might also mean "where did he go")

repeat chorus

Broken heart don't feel so bad
Ain't got half of what you thought you had

I have always loved Hunter for these lines. Regardless of what you make of the rest of the song, they are perfect. A subject for another post, perhaps, but yes: one day you realise you never had the friends you thought you did, and a whole other emotional weather system (loneliness, a broken heart) installs itself in your soul, and you then realise that, well, it's something you can, despite earlier fears, adjust to well enough.

Rock your baby to and fro
Not too fast and not too slow

(? A far fetched interpretation would have the "baby" as a raft or canoe or similar conveyance, but I never really bothered to think these lines through. They just feel right.)

repeat chorus

That's the way it's been in town
ever since they tore the juke-box down
Two-bit piece don't buy no more
not so much as it done before

OK, this part always floored me, though if you pushed me I'd say the sort of people who tear down jukeboxes are just exactly the same sort of people who would have had slaves and hunted them when they ran away, and that we are all of us (slaves or not) the worse for their interventions ("two-bit piece don't buy no more"). Empathetic identification with the downtrodden? Good enough, or not, you decide.

repeat chorus, end

The music. The beginning of the song always sounds unexpectedly slow and dragging, and the rhythm throughout seems calculated to evoke slowness, stoicism and dogged determination, with extra bars of repeated cadences thrown in here and there to emphasize slowness and difficulty. The harmonies are simple and appear to want to evoke a rustic, backwater, country feel. The ethereal backing vocals on the chorus suggest isolation and a nocturnal ambience. Garcia's vocals, sad and elegiac. Ghostly feeling in the outro, as if the camera ends on a wide shot of the river just before dawn. A simple song, but nothing missing, a nuanced instrumental accompaniment that never merely repeats anything, and as much emotional depth as you want to put into it.