"Key West is the place to be
If you're looking for immortality
Key West is Paradise divine"
Like most Dylan fans, I've spent a lot of time lately listening to Rough and Rowdy Ways. It's a remarkable album, but I've been going back to one song more than most: 'Key West (Philosopher Pirate)', which acts as a sort-of album closer at the end of disc 1, separated as it is from the towering 'Murder Most Foul' on disc two. Listening to 'Key West', I can't help but picture Bob as he appears on the back cover of Tempest - with shades on in his top-down convertible - taking a sunset drive down the Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West, the musings on life and mortality that make up the lyrics drifting through his mind as he drives.
The song's position as an (almost) album closer, combined with it's content of a narrator seemingly looking toward the world beyond, reminded me of several other songs that appear on Dylan albums, usually as the final song. 'Heaven Songs', I call them, and they're something of a recurring trend.
The first one is 'Rank Strangers to Me' from Dylan's 1988 album Down in the Groove. 'Rank Strangers', written by Albert E. Brumley and first published in 1942, was a signature song for The Stanley Brothers, and is described by Cary O'Dell of the Library of Congress as "a song about death, the transcendence and an afterlife". Dylan's version of the track - which, like 'Key West', is preceded by a song about crossing a river - places the singer in a barren, desolate landscape, as he returns to his former "home in the mountains" and reminisces about a time when he was "happy and free." To his dismay, he finds that so much time has passed that he no longer knows anyone in his hometown; even his friends and family are nowhere to be found. As he explains in the final verse:
They've all moved away, said the voice of a stranger
To a beautiful home by the bright crystal sea
Some beautiful day I'll meet them in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me
'Lone Pilgrim', the second in this series of 'Heaven Songs', appears at the end of World Gone Wrong, Dylan's 1993 album of folk and blues songs. In his liner notes for the album, Dylan reveals that he based his version of the song - credited here to B.F. White but apparently based on an 1838 poem by Elder John Ellis - on Doc Watson's interpretation, probably from the 1963 Folkways album The Watson Family. The song starts off being narrated by a visitor to the grave of the titular 'lone pilgrim', but soon switches to the voice of the pilgrim's ghost, who speaks of his contentment in the afterlife. The last verse is my favourite:
Go tell my companion and children most dear
To weep not for me now I'm gone
The same hand that lead me through scenes most severe
Has kindly assisted me home
The next song is, besides 'Key West', the only track on this list penned by Bob himself: the mighty 'Highlands' from 1997's Time Out of Mind. 'Highlands', the way I hear it, is a song about being directionless; the narrator drifts "from scene to scene" aimlessly (for 17 minutes), with his only comfort being the thought of the Highlands off in the distance. Does he get there? No, but that's okay, because like he says in the final line - as if realising it for the very first time - "I'm already there in my mind, and that's good enough for now." You can almost hear one corner of his mouth curling into a wry smile as he trudges off on his way.
Elsewhere in the song, Bob refers to the Highlands as "where the Aberdeen waters flow". While Aberdeen itself is not in the Scottish Highlands, the sources both of its rivers - the River Don and the River Dee - can be found there.
The final song in this group is one that Bob has a long history with. His first performance of 'That Lucky Old Sun' was in 1985, a full thirty years before it appeared as the closing song on his 2015 standards album Shadows in the Night. Featured semi-regularly during Dylan's 1986 tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, it has since made rare, Bigfoot-like appearances over the course of the Never Ending Tour, showing up as a one-off in 1991, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The song, written by Beasley Smith and Haven Gillespie in 1949, finds the narrator reflecting on his life of hard work and toil, and envying "that lucky old sun" who has "nothing to do but roll around heaven all day". There's another river reference here, too:
Show me that river, lift me across,
And wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do
But roll around heaven all day
(On a side note, a very similar song called 'Walk Around Heaven All Day' - written in 1964 by Cassietta George - was a regular feature of Bob's shows in 1980 and 1981, initially sung by Mary Elisabeth Bridges before being taken on by Carolyn Dennis)
So what's with all the rivers? Well, several religions and cultures, including Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the ancient Greek and Norse civilisations, feature the idea of a river that must be crossed in order to reach the afterlife. The same concept appears in John Bunyan's 1678 novel, The Pilgrim's Progress (or, to to give the book it's full title, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come):
Now, I further saw, that between them and the gate was a river, but there was no bridge to go over: the river was very deep. At the sight, therefore, of this river, the Pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went in with them said, You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.
Darren Hirst, writing for crossrhythms.co.uk, suggests that the The Pilgrim's Progress might have been an influence on Time Out of Mind, and describes that album as "a journey which climaxes in the transition from this world into the city of God". That description could also be applied to Rough and Rowdy Ways.
All of this brings us back to 'Key West', the enchanted land of Bougainvillea, Truman's White House, innocence, purity, and immortality, where even if you get that bleedin' heart disease, the healing virtues of the wind will restore you to full health. What's the difference between the Highlands, the Lowlands and the Flatlands? There isn't any - it's all the same place, and you only have to cross the river to get there.
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