Blue Wing (by Tom Russell)
Dave Alvin
Blue Wing
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He had a blue wing tattooed on his shoulder
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Might’ve been a bluebird, I don’t know
But he’d get stone drunk and talk about Alaska
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Salmon boats and forty-five below
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Well he got that blue wing in jail in Walla Walla
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And his cellmate there was Little Willie John
Willie he was once a great blues singer
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So Wing and Willie wrote him up a song
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Said it’s dark in here I can’t see the sky
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But I look at this blue wing and I close my eye
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And I fly away beyond these walls
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Up above the clouds where the rain don’t fall on a poor man’s dream
Well they paroled Blue Wing in August 1963
And he moved on picking apples to the town of Winatchee
Where the winter finally caught him in a rundown trailer park
On the south side of Seattle where the days grow gray and dark
He drank and he dreamt a vision of when the salmon still run free
And his father’s fathers crossed that wide, old Bering Sea
And the land belonged to everyone and there were old songs yet to sing
Now it’s narrowed down to a cheap hotel and a tattooed prison wing
Said it’s dark in here I can’t see the sky
But I look at this blue wing and I close my eye
And I fly away beyond these walls
Up above the clouds where the rain don’t fall on a poor man’s dream
Well he drank his way to L.A. and that’s where he died
No one knew his Christian name, and there was no one there who cried
But I dreamt there was a service, a preacher and an old pine box
Halfway through the sermon, Blue Wing began to talk
Said it’s dark in here I can’t see the sky
But I look at this blue wing and I close my eye
And I fly away beyond these walls
Up above the clouds where the rain don’t fall on a poor man’s dream
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