Blue Wing (by Tom Russell)
Dave Alvin
Blue Wing



          D
He had a blue wing tattooed on his shoulder
                                   Em7
Might’ve been a bluebird, I don’t know 

But he’d get stone drunk and talk about Alaska
 A                             D
Salmon boats and forty-five below 


 D
Well he got that blue wing in jail in Walla Walla
                                          Em7
And his cellmate there was Little Willie John

Willie he was once a great blues singer
    A                              D
So Wing and Willie wrote him up a song

                                        G
Said it’s dark in here I can’t see the sky
       D                                     A
But I look at this blue wing and I close my eye
            D                G 
And I fly away beyond these walls
               D                           A                     D
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