It was 16 years ago tonight at the Christmas Eve-eve-eve party in the Bowen House that the late Dave Peyton gifted us with a classic rendition of his all-time favorite John Prine tune. And fortunately, Pamela Bowen had her camera running to preserve the video above.
“Come Back to Us, Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard” was introduced on Prine’s 1975 Common Sense album, but the song didn’t really resonate with Br’er Dave until he heard it again about a dozen years later as the opening track on the John Prine Live album.
By that time, The Flood had gone in recess, as reported here earlier, but the song was still very much on David’s mind when the band reconvened in the mid-1990s, and “Barbara Lewis” then kept coming back to us in the years to come.
About the Song
The late John Prine said in the liner notes for that 1988 “live” album that he wrote “Barbara Lewis” in the summer of 1973 while he was touring Colorado ski towns with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
The lyrics were inspired, he said, by the “leftover hippies” he encountered in the Rocky Mountains, people who had drifted through various counterculture movements and religions without ever making it all the way to California.
It was, he said, as if they got to the Rockies and said, “God, I can’t get over that,” and just settled in.
Besides that, John added, “I had different friends of mine who went through the ‘60s, from being totally straight or greasers, then turned into hippies, and then into a religious thing. So I created this character who had done all those different things.”
About the title, Prine said he got the name Barbara Lewis from the R&B singer (”Hello Stranger,” 1963; “Baby, I’m Yours,”1965).
And the rest of the name of the character? “It just falls off the tongue really nicely,” John said, noting he often tried to match a syllable for each note. “I call it the Chuck Berry School of Songwriting. He’s got it so dead-on that you can just read his lyric, and that would be a melody.”
More John and More Dave
If this single song doesn’t completely satisfy your Flood needs right now, you can have many more helpings at the band website’s free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
For instance, if you’d like more Floodifying of John Prine songs, check out our John Prine Memorial playlist. Click below for the details:
Meanwhile, if you’d like to listen again to some of the many beloved tunes featuring our old buddy Dave Peyton, check out the David Channel.
