“That life, it is contagious, and it gets down in your blood.”
Corpus Christi Bay may not be as well known as big a crowd pleaser as The Road Goes on Forever (a great song in its own right), but it’s as pitch perfect as a song gets. It’s as poetic as Byron, tells as good a story as any Texas Country song, and a deep streak of melancholy lurking beneath its surface.
That subtle melancholy is nowhere starker than in the line, after his brother visits him (still in Corpus Christi Bay): “He said he finally gave up drinking, then he ordered me a beer.” Life for his brother has moved on, and he’s still mired in the same place. What’s worse, his brother doesn’t contemplate him doing so. He’s marked incorrigible.
And is there a less hopeful line than, “if I could live my life all over, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because I never could stay sober”?
Corpus Christi Bay is off one of the all-time great Texas Country albums, Robert Earl Keen’s A Bigger Piece of Sky.
Music Monday is the brainchild of Drew at The Tattooed Book Geek.
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REK is a favorite in the Clan Cornelius household. There are a couple of incendiary live versions of this song out there — and you’re right: there’s something profoundly poignant about it.
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