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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 7/29/2025: Playing Gulf [1]

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Date: 2025-07-29

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm: Birches in Summer (1869)

Good evening, Kibitzers!

Here in the Boston area, we’ve been having some Canadian wildfire smoke, and now we also have yet another heat advisory. You know that episode of original Star Trek, where all the people on a planet went to the library, where they could step through a time portal into their planet’s past and live there instead? Yeah, that. (I don’t think the Boston Public Library is yet offering that service, but if they did, I think it might be quite popular.)

I’ve had notes for this diary stashed in a text document since, oh, January, but I finally have time to open the thing and put the diary together. Sadly, it’s still relevant, except inasmuch as it’s been supplanted by a bazillion other idiotic yet hair-raisingly fascist things. Obviously, “it wrecks some songs” is among the least of the reasons to not randomly rename a geographical feature to something ignorant and jingoistic.

I am speaking, you’ll have guessed, of the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water with a perfectly appropriate name that it apparently received in about 1550. Since that time, its name has appeared in a number of songs; I’ve collected some here. Not that an argument related to the arts would cut any ice with the philistine proprietors of the “Melania Trump Opera House”.

Louise: The Yardbirds (British TV special Go Tell It on the Mountain, July 1964) Note that this is not the sad John Prine song with the same title. [2:57]

Louise, why don't you hurry home?

You made me run from Chicago

To the Gulf of Mexico

Refuge of the Roads: Joni Mitchell (Refuge of the Roads live DVD, 1983) [7:09]

The nets were overflowing

In the Gulf of Mexico

They were overflowing in the refuge of the roads

Up on Cripple Creek: The Band (The Ed Sullivan Show, November 1969). [3:45]

When I get off of this mountain

You know where I want to go

Straight down the Mississippi River

To the Gulf of Mexico

Alabama Song: Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer (Americana Music Association Conference & Festival, Nashville, September 2017) Another title clarification: this is not the Kurt Weill/Doors/Whiskey Bar song. [5:13]

Are you going to Alabama

Where the trees grow tall and green

I'd like to see the Gulf of Mexico

If you're going, won't you take me?

The Battle of New Orleans: Glen Campbell (Dublin, May 1981) [3:12]

We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin'

There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago

We fired once more and they began to runnin'

Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

Gulf Coast Highway: Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews (Austin City Limits, Austin, February 2000) [3:04]

Gulf Coast Highway

He worked the rails

He worked the rice fields with their cool dark wells

He worked the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico

Pink Houses: John Mellencamp (Farm Aid, First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, Tinley Park IL, 2005) [8:15]

Well, there's people and more people

What do they know?

Go to work in some high-rise

And vacation down at the Gulf of Mexico

Carolina Moon: Scotty McCreery, featuring Alison Krauss (McCreery album See You Tonight, 2013; with images of North Carolina) [4:45]

I woke up this morning to the hummin' of the engines

Haulin' nature's finest from the Gulf of Mexico

Gulf of Mexico: Steve Earle (Factory Theatre, Sydney, Australia, 2012) [5:06]

Come and gather around me, people, and a tale to you I'll tell

Of my father and his father in the days before the spill

With an endless sky above 'em and a restless sea below

And every blessing flowing from the Gulf of Mexico

The Other Side of This Life: Jefferson Airplane (Altamont Speedway Free Festival, 1969) [6:45]

Well, I don't know what I'm doin'

Half the time I don't know where I'll go

I think I'm gonna get me a sailin' boat

And sail the Gulf of Mexico

Standing on the Moon: The Grateful Dead (JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, July 1989) [8:18]

Standing on the moon

I'm feeling so alone and blue

I see the Gulf of Mexico

As tiny as a tear

The coast of California

Must be somewhere over here

[END]
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