Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" song - maybe more complicated than we thought!

I was thinking today that it's been 26 years that I've been participating in online discussions. That was back in the day when I first got an AOL account. For those under 55 or so, that stood for "America Online."

The Movable Type software that made blogging feasible as a widespread phenomenon hadn't yet been developed. So Message Boards and listservs were where you mainly had to go to have the kind of conversations that now take place on Twitter and Facebook and in the blogosphere.

It didn't take me long to find places to engage in the kind of conversations that interested me. I was particular interested in fan forums where people discussed folk and country music. I was reminded of that today when I looked up a YouTube recording of Johnny Cash's late-career rendition of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot's song, "If You Could Read My Mind."

Which got me to thinking about Lightfoot's song "Sundown," his biggest hit in the US market, here in a somewhat funked-up version by Jesse Winchester:

The song is one of an infinite number from the viewpoint of a guy tormented by the inscrutable ways of wimmen. In this case, jealousy and insecurity being heavy in the mix.

It's kind of a sultry song, with the off-scene girlfriend, or love object, or sex object, or whatever she is, sounding like a sultry seductress that could tempt a guy to want to get wild and crszy:

I can see her lyin' back in her satin dress
In a room where ya do what ya don't confess ...

She's been lookin' like a queen in a sailor's dream
And she don't always say what she really means ...

I can picture every move that a man could make
Getting lost in her lovin' is your first mistake

One of the things I learned, though, in those fan forums is that people can get very engaged with popular songs. And even people who keep their interpretations of lyrics within some kind of sensible bound can find very different things in songs, not all of which are mutually exclusive.

I don't recall this song ever coming up on any those online discussions in which I took part. But one thing about this song is that there is a threatening edge in the lyrics, although it. These lines appear five times in the linked lyrics:

Sundown you better take care
If I find you been creepin' 'round my back stairs

Chelsea Crowell - daughter of Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell - discusses the murder-ballad subgenre in Killer Songs: The 10 Creepiest Country Murder Ballads Rolling Stone 11/16/2019, observing, "To be a bona fide country murder tale, the song must have a homicide (or two), a narrative and, of course, possess that distinctive country sound. Ergo, 'Murder Was the Case' wouldn’t qualify. Likewise, simply mentioning the capital offense does not a murder ballad make — there needs to be action."

There are no murders or burials in "Sundown." My own take on "got me feeling mean" is that it just refers to feeling a bit randy, aka, horny. But "you better take care" is a threatening or at least warning phrase. But it could mean, "don't hang around me unless you're interested in a romantic and/or sexual relationship."

But then, until literally today I had always assumed that Sundown was the woman the narrator is brooding over. But a take at the gordonlightfoot.com fan site suggests, "Gordon Lightfoot's Sundown is one of his most famous songs. It is about infidelity, but Sundown is not the woman, but the other man who is pursuing her!"

Once a songwriter puts his creation out in the world, people are going to develop their own understandings of it. That's a sign that a song is resonating with people if they actually take the time to try to tease out the meaning of the lyrics. That goes even for "murder ballads," which reflect the all-too-real problem of domestic violence. Instances of it include The Chicks' Goodbye Earl and Frankie and Johnny , which put the story in a somewhat different context than most.

But it's also interesting to see what the writers themselves say about them. This is what Gordon himself said in an interview this year (Matt Fink, Gordon Lightfoot: Sunrise to Sundown American Songwriter 08/05/2020):

What do you think it was about your song “Sundown” that connected with people so easily?

Well, it’s got a good beat to it. It’s got interesting harmonic passages. It has a great arrangement and not too bad of a vocal. If I was going to do it again, I’d probably try to do the vocal again. I’d do it the way Jesse Winchester does it. It comes out a little bit funkier. He’s great. I was on a roll writing a whole bunch of songs at that time, and it was one of your typical insecurity-type songs, a “where is my baby tonight” kind of concept [laughs]. People can relate to that. It’s that concern about not being totally in control of a given situation. I was writing a whole bunch of stuff at that time. I think my girlfriend was out with her friends one night at a bar while I was at home writing songs. I thought, “I wonder what she’s doing with her friends at that bar!” It’s that kind of a feeling. “Where is my true love tonight? What is my true love doing?” I guess a lot of people really do relate to that. That’s part of romance ... that wondering.

The SongFacts site provides this quote:

The inspiration for this song came from Lightfoot worrying about his girlfriend, who was out at bars all day while he was at home writing songs. He recalled during a Reddit AMA: "I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin'!"

"As a matter of fact, it was written just around Sundown," he added, "just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album."

Lightfoot most likely wrote this about the stormy relationship with his one time girlfriend Cathy Smith, who was later sentenced for delivering a lethal dose of heroin to John Belushi. [my emphasis]

Of course, if the woman you're obsessing over is a actual "black widow" type, it's you yourself who "better take care"! Yo!

That also opens some additional ways of reading lines like, "In a room where ya do what ya don't confess" and "Getting lost in her lovin' is your first mistake"!

Long Globe and Mail obituary for Smith: Brad Wheeler, Cathy Smith, who admitted to killing John Belushi, was a woman of mystery 08/28/2020. Wheller writes:

In 2014, after not seeing Mr. Lightfoot for some 20 years, Ms. Smith attended a concert of his at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. As he sang his 1972 song Beautiful, Mr. Lightfoot glanced her way. “Our fingernails were embedded in each other’s forearms, trying not to sob,” said Ms. St. Nicholas, who sat with her friend in the front row. “I truly believe they were the love of each other’s life.”

That night Mr. Lightfoot also sang Rainy Day People, a poignant 1975 song about “high-stepping strutters who land in the gutters.” He had written it on a drizzling day, with Ms. Smith in mind: “Rainy day lovers don’t hide love inside, they just pass it on.”