I like the song, although I’m only really familiar with it through Nilsson’s jaunty late-60s recording of it. Tom, I agree that the content of the lyric is fabulous stuff, and really quite provocative for 1956 (although this was a generation that had survived the Depression - perhaps certain things were less shocking then than I would expect).

But…. the performance is a mismatch. The clarinet tag is a hook but it’s a dinky, tidy hook; the bigger problem is Ford himself, who takes the swagger into a territory too oily to sell the blues his song is describing. You believe that he’s maybe seen hard times in Prohibition raids - but loading tonnage, not so much. Even the elfin Nilsson managed to make a more cohesive package out of this, IMO.

The ‘plong, plonnnnng’ tones that show up late in the track are a stroke of genius, though. With the shuffle of the percussion they almost evoke a train’s horn, but they are vague and untraceable, the one bit of ghostly Western weirdness that the song needs so much more of.

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