Danville Girl

Dylan’s hero Woody Guthrie wrote and recorded a song titled “Danville Girl” that included the lyrics “Got stuck on a Danville girl … she wore that Danville curl”, lyrics that are echoed in “Brownsville Girl”. Dylan’s debt to Guthrie’s song is more obvious in “New Danville Girl”, the first version of the song that Dylan had recorded for 1985’s Empire Burlesque. That version was not officially released until it appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol. 16: Springtime in New York 1980–1985 in 2021. Lyrically, “Brownsville Girl” features a first-person narrator speaking to an ex-lover, one presumably from years gone by. He speaks of her wistfully, even though it is clear he is with someone else now, and muses that his current partner reminds him of his former flame (he says she has the “same dark rhythm in her soul”). The singer often interrupts his reminiscences of the mysterious “Brownsville Girl” to describe the plot of a western movie starring Gregory Peck that he saw once (but believes he ‘sat through it twice’). The plot of the film, about a young upstart who shoots an aging gunslinger, and then is warned by the dying man that now he must watch his own back, sounds like 1950’s The Gunfighter. It is possible, however, that the song refers to multiple Gregory Peck films: 1946’s Duel in the Sun is about two brothers in Texas fighting for the love of a dark beauty named Pearl Chavez, and the song’s narrator mentions standing in line to see a movie starring Peck even though “it’s not the one that I had in mind