I was listening to variant versions of Chuck
Berry’s song “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” -
sometimes brown-eyed gets hyphenated, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s an interesting song. As I’m not the first to observe, at this
point in history you inevitably hear it as a song about race: he’s really
singing about skin color, not eye color.
The fact that the song could be a hit in America 1956 is some measure of
its double-coding and perhaps of its deniability.
I can’t find a great Chuck Berry live version,
but here he is performing the song with Robert Cray (no, I can't work out how to put the video itself on my blog):
The lyric that interests us here comes in
the second verse
Flying across the
desert in a TWA,
I saw a woman walking across the sand
She been a walkin' thirty miles en route to Bombay
To get a brown eyed handsome man
Her destination was a brown eyed handsome man
I saw a woman walking across the sand
She been a walkin' thirty miles en route to Bombay
To get a brown eyed handsome man
Her destination was a brown eyed handsome man
*
Well, Bombay (or Mumbai as we now know it) is of course a pretty good place to find a brown-skinned
or indeed brown-eyed man, though I don’t know that there’s a lot of sand in precisely that part of India.
Now, the song has been much covered by
people of varying eye and skin color – Buddy Holly, Paul McCartney, Lyall
Lovett – they all sang the line about Bombay; but Waylon Jennings in his own
countrified version sings it thus, in 1970 – yep he really dressed like that in
1970, but he got over it:
The lyrics in question:
Flying cross the
desert in a TWA
Saw a woman walking cross the sand
She’s been walking thirty miles en route to L.A. to get
A brown eyed handsome man
The destination was a brown eyed handsome man
Saw a woman walking cross the sand
She’s been walking thirty miles en route to L.A. to get
A brown eyed handsome man
The destination was a brown eyed handsome man
Now
obviously you get a very different class of brown-eyed man in LA than you do in
Bombay, and you’re in with a better chance of finding sand. The song also works perfectly well when sung by a woman, Fontella Bass sang Bombay (it’s a great version), and Tanya Tucker
sang LA.
So, a question: did Jennings change the line in the interests of
topographic accuracy? Or did he think
that walking to Bombay was just too darn exotic, maybe even Orientalist, for
his country fans? I’m guessing the
latter.
