2:36
New Riders of the Purple Sage, 1971
Written by John Dawson
The album this song is on is the only studio album by the New Riders to feature co-founder Jerry Garcia on pedal steel guitar; you can hear his distinctive shimmer in the arrangement. The song is an otherwise unremarkable an uptempo country rock, with Dawson's sleepy vocals doing a fine job, but not exactly making the song pop. He sounds less like a narrator leaning into drama than a guy recounting a strange story over a beer, which fits the band’s laid-back ethos but doesn’t quite elevate the track into memorability.. Lyrically, it's a story song about the titular Henry, who drives a truck to Mexico to grab some drugs ("twenty keys of gold") to sell to waiting clients, but gets high on the product and races back through Tijuana at breakneck speed. And there the song ends; we never know if Henry crashes, languishes in a Mexican prison, or manages to satisfy the "fifty people waiting back home" for his delivery.
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