The Victors

from Townes. Nice, mellow, depressing ballad about hardship, poverty, whoring, and suicide to close the evening of a beautiful day.

The name she gave was Caroline
The daughter of a miner.
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
That sunshine walked beside her.

https://youtu.be/hnGjJOiuCzc?list=PL812B71037008FABB



A little blurb about the song form Daily Kos community a few years ago:

Tecumseh Valley: A Townes Van Zandt Song about a woman who called herself Caroline

by Passage2Truth

Saturday, July 22, 2017 at 7:56 AM MST

” . . . and the sunshine walked beside her.”
My “Pancho and Lefty” post got enough positive response (my expectations aren’t high) that I thought I would do a brief diary on another slideshow I compiled last week. This is another slideshow inspired and accompanied by a Townes Van Zandt song, “Tecumseh Valley,” which–by the way–is a real place in Oklahoma (as is Spencer, also mentioned in the song).

It’s kind of an alt-country narrative ballad, a little ragged around the edges, and I think I chose this live version of the song because of that very raggedness. I was immediately drawn to it when I first heard the studio version on Townes’ Drama Falls Like Teardrops compilation.

There is a beautiful music that Townes’ finds in the name (“Te-cum-seh”), and the simple poetry of the seasons, the dignity of labor, and in human passion just sort of stunned me (a fairly normal reaction for me listening to his songs). It seems to mean even more to me now than when I first heard it, in that I realize that it is a song about someone we would essentially look at as a “disposable” person (and we’d call her much worse than that), beneath our notice except as someone to use and discard like a crumpled paper cup.

The song (also recorded by Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle, among others) gives expression, dignity, and beauty to her hopes, harsh circumstances, struggles, and desires in a way that that I feel is too rarely seen, although doubtless some people will disagree.