Tucumcari scores immortality in song

I think a town really knows it has arrived when it’s been immortalized in song. Lots of cities never make the cut.

My boss, who manages the Clovis, Portales and Tucumcari newsrooms for Freedom New Mexico, recently put out a plea on his blog for media references to the city of Tucumcari for a history project he’s working on.

With Tucumcari being a second hometown for me, after living there 13 years, I knew I had run across lots of references to the city over the years, but only a few came quickly to mind.

The first thing that popped into my brain was a song written by Lowell George of the band Little Feat and made popular in the 1970s by Linda Ronstadt called “Willing.” Everybody’s heard the song and remembers the name of the town because of the song.

It’s a bit of a trucker’s anthem and the chorus with the Tucumcari mention goes like this:

“I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari

Tehachapi to Tonapah

Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made

I’ve driven the back roads so I wouldn’t get weighed

If you give me: weed, whites, and wine

And you show me a sign

I’ll be willin’ to be movin’”

The next most well-known Tucumcari reference is in the Bobby Troup song, “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” You may have trouble remembering it because it comes after the break:

“You’ll like the aroma, of Tulsa, Oklahoma,

Albuquerque and Tucumcari, make New Mexico extraordinary!”

The other biggie is a song by Jimmie Rodgers called “Tucumcari,” that nearly everyone who’s lived there knows, because a morning radio show used the song as a theme for years.

Rodgers sings about getting back to a yellow-haired girl in Tucumcari and counts down the miles to Tucumcari in the verses.  Unfortunately, the yellow-haired girl turned out not to be the girl of his dreams.

The song references don’t end there though. I knew they didn’t, but it took Google to refresh my memory and bring up a few new ones.

• The rock band Better Than Ezra included it in the chorus of a song called “Coyote” in the 1970s.

• A country song called “The Ballad of Hi Jolly” also rang a bell. In it, songwriter Randy Sparks includes a verse about pretty gals in Albuquerque and pretty gals in Tucumcari too.

• Back in the trucking genre, Dale Watson had a song “Tucumcari Here I Come” where the line goes, “Get the load I carry to Tucumcari.”

• John Denver mentions Tucumcari in a forgettable tune called “Last Hobo” where an out-of-work iron worker drifts down to the eastern New Mexico town, then begins to ride the rails.

• A song by cowboy songwriter Dan Roberts gets the prize for using the name the most times — 15, I think, in his “Tucumcari Woman.”

• A song by someone named Freedy Johnston entitled “Tucumcari” also came up.

• A dubious distinction for the city may be the song titled “Tucumcari” by the band Cex. (I think it’s pronounced “sex” judging from the album title, which I can’t repeat here.)

• Finally, Pat Duran of Albuquerque combined with Jim Jones to make a country album entitled “Tucumcari Tonight” after the town’s famous billboard campaign.

Who woulda thought one town could get so many lyrics. It seems from my research, Portales only has “The Streets of Portales” by local musician Andy Mason to claim. Clovis, which bills itself as city linked to music and Buddy Holly, only has one song that pops up — “Clovis, New Mexico” by Hank Williams Jr.

We’ve got a lot of ground to make up on our neigbor to the north.

Karl Terry is managing editor at the Portales News-Tribune. Contact him at 356-4481, ext. 33 or e-mail:
karl_terry@link.freedom.com