Bob Dylan is 85 today, and to mark the occasion—and also to nod towards his Neverending Tour—we’ve picked Duncan and Brady, which he included in his live sets more than 80 times between 1999 and 2002, but hasn’t been released on a studio album.
Duncan and Brady is a traditional song, going back to the 1890s, and tells the story of a police officer getting shot in a bar. It is a Black murder ballad. So on the face of it, it looks like one of those ”bad man” songs that populate Black American music, in the tradition of Staggerlee.
It’s based on a true story. The incident that inspired the song happened in St Louis in 1890. There are multiple versions of what happened, and Wikipedia seems on this occasion to be unreliable, so I’ve pieced this together from several online accounts. Several police officers arrived at the Charles Starkes Saloon after a fight broke out nearby, and those involved ran into the saloon.
When the police tried to arrest those they suspected of starting the fight, shots were fired. In one account, Brady had harassed Duncan’s brother on the street. Brady may have been killed by the bar’s owner, Charles Starkes, but Duncan made this allegation some time after his arrest, and he was eventually hanged for Brady’s murder.
W.C. Handy mentions hearing a version of the song in St Louis in the 1890s, and the first recording is in 1929 by a white singer, Wilmer Watts (who transposes the names). Lead Belly sings a version in the 1940s.
The provenance of Duncan and Brady in the Dylan repertoire is a bit of Bob arcania. After the critical failure of Under The Red Sky in 1990, Dylan stopped writing and turned to other people’s songs, which led to Good As I Been To You in 1992, and World Gone Wrong a year later. But just before he recorded Good As I Been To You he went into the studio with the singer-songwriter David Bromberg and recorded a collection of mostly traditional songs. And then, being Bob, decided not to release it. Duncan and Brady, from those sessions, later surfaced on ‘Bootleg Series Vol 8,’, Tell Tale Signs.
On stage, Bob Dylan seems to have used the song as an opening number, and it is a high speed electric version. He probably picked it up from Paul Clayton, who recorded it as Been On The Job Too Long in the 1950s. Clayton is something of a neglected figure now, but he was a song collector and a singer who was vastly influential in shaping the repertoire of the whole early ‘60s Greenwich Village crowd. Clayton mentored Dylan for a while, but died young in 1967.
Dave van Ronk also has a version, and Bob Dylan famously borrowed from van Ronk’s repertoire, but van Ronk’s singing is slower, closer to Lead Belly’s recording than Clayton’s.
There are more recent versions as well, by Paul Brady, Tom Rush, and New Riders of the Purple Sage, among many others. The first version of Duncan and Brady that I heard was by Martin Simpson, on his standout album Prodigal Son, and I have to say that Simpson’s short and sprightly version brings a smile to my face every time I hear it.
Simpson lived in New Orleans for a number of years, and as well as his always outstanding guitar playing, this also has a touch of the honky tonk about it.
Duncan and Brady is more ambiguous than just being a “bad man” song. The lyrics suggest that Duncan isn’t a killer living outside of the law, as with most Staggerlee songs, but instead that Brady was maybe a corrupt cop who got what was coming to him. Here’s a bit of the lyric:
Well, it’s twinkle, twinkle, little star
‘Long comes Brady in his ‘lectric car
Got a mean look right in his eye
He gonna shoot somebody just to see him die
He been on the job too long.
You can see how the song might appeal if you ever had any dealings with police officers in the American South.
And there’s more to the story. As Patrick Blackman recounts in Sing Out, Brady was Irish, and Duncan, like Charles Starkes, was black. Harrison Duncan’s appeal against his conviction went all the way to the Supreme Court (“Duncan vs Missouri”), where his lawyer, Walter Moran Farmer, the first Black lawyer to graduate from Washington University, was one of the first black lawyers to appear before the Court.
Duncan, by the way, was surprisingly popular in St Louis. There is sympathetic coverage of his trial and appeals against conviction in the city’s newspapers. He was a well-known singer, who even sang a couple of songs to reporters a few days before his execution. According to Elijah Wald, a long article, after his death said,
“He was a sport, a jolly fellow, a swell dresser, a ladies’ favorite, but, above all, he was a magnificent singer. . . . They all say there never was a colored basso like him in town and few in the country who could outclass him.”
One of the oddities of Duncan and Brady, given its provenance, is the reference in some versions to Brady’s “electric car”. This helps with the scansion, and it’s also a reminder that electric cars started life far earlier than we think, although in this case they are probably a slight anachronism. Before a lot of oil was discovered in America, there were viable electric cars in the US, competing with petrol driven vehicles, although the first mass produced electric vehicles didn’t appear in the United States until the early 1900s.
Jim Motavalli, who handily blogs on both music and cars, has an interesting theory about this. Brady, the murdered cop, has a rich namesake, the New York financier ‘Diamond’ Jim Brady, who got a lot of publicity in 1895 for driving an electric buggy around New York. So it’s possible, as the blogger halfhearteddude has suggested, that this is from an early version of the song where the singer, or writer, is having a bit of fun with the coincidence of the two names.
All in all, the song, and Bob Dylan’s version of it, is a reminder that once he has heard a song, Dylan rarely forgets it, and that his repertoire is vast. Happy birthday, Bob!
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