Shotgun Annie

We would go to the forgotten towns of west Texas Places that we couldn’t name and hunt for their souls Sometime it was on the roadside a place they had been abandoned Sometimes in and old house broken and forgotten She’d stand there in her boots and ragged old skirt and start to sing A lonesome strain of an old cowboy song And they would come to her and as they did we would lay them down beside her Put them to rest one final time. Jack would play the fiddle and me the tambourine Scrappy would join in on the guitar and we’d work the place until we had all those lost spirits Standing in the corners or sitting in the shadows They came to us waiting for a final place to rest. Some where girls an others young caballeros Who’d lost their way in a crash to their final destination She’d sing “My Rifle, My Pony and Me” and they would enter her soul Annie would take as many as she could and then we would have to leave She would collapse on the ground and we would carry her to the car And drive far into the desert close to the borderline We would start a fire and begin to sing and play once again And the spirits would leave her one by one some painfully some like flowing water Then we would head to the nearest town and buy some tequila and drink until dawn… We did this for years until Annie couldn’t stand it any longer One day she said she lost her taste for the dead and she never sang again I can still hear her voice down by the river Flowing across the rocks and down along the bottoms And I wonder where she ended up for I lost her in El Paso Never once she said and twice would be forever…. So now I sing those songs hoping to remember that lonesome sound That woke the dead and brought them to our souls Sometimes it seems like yesterday but I know it is a lifetime from this place