“Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” (Elton John)

Your classic song that you didn’t know Dusty Springfield sang vocals on of the day is “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” by Elton John. This is an album track (side one, track one), not a single, from Elton’s 1971 album, Tumbleweed Connection. The album peaked at #5 on the Billboard 200 album chart and #2 on the UK Albums chart.

Tumbleweed Connection is my favorite Elton John album (with Madman Across the Water being a close second). Like it is with many artists, I like early Elton a whole lot better than later Elton. The man has had an astounding 50+ year career, but I think his first few albums were his best; his later music, in my humble opinion, often became a parody of itself. That’s to my ears, anyway.

This album is all about the American West, seen through the eyes of an Englishman named Bernie Taupin. Bernie was the guy who wrote most of the words that his friend Elton John put to music, so if there’s an Elton song that particularly touches you, it’s really Bernie who made that happen. In this instance, Mr. Taupin channeled old Westerns, or at least the impressions left by them, and wrote what was almost a concept album about life in the Wild West of the 1800s.

That said, Bernie wrote these songs before he’d ever touched foot in America. He says his influence was something else entirely:

“Everybody thinks that I was influenced by Americana and by seeing America first hand, but we wrote and recorded the album before we’d even been to the States. It was totally influenced by The Band’s Music from Big Pink and Robbie Robertson’s songs. I’ve always loved Americana, and I loved American Westerns. I’ve always said that ‘El Paso‘ [by Marty Robbins] was the song that made me want to write songs, it was the perfect meshing of melody and storyline, and I thought that here was something that married rhythms and the written word completely.”

So there you have it. The songs on Tumbleweed Connection were about the American West as channeled by an Englishman from listening to Bob Dylan’s backing band, The Band. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

For his part, Elton himself spoke highly of the album. “Lyrically and melodically, that’s probably one of our most perfect albums. I don’t think there’s any song on there that doesn’t melodically fit the lyric.”

He’s right, this is a killer collection of tracks, all tied to a single theme. “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun” kicked off the album, establishing that theme both lyrically and musically. It’s about a gunslinger on the lam who finally gets captured by the Pinkertons. It rocks hard with Elton’s honky-tonk piano playing and some stellar call-and-response background vocals.

Those background vocals were supplied by some of Britain’s finest singers of the time—Madeline Bell, Kay Garner, Lesley Duncan, Tony Hazzard, Tony Burrows, and a lady known as Dusty Springfield. (You can definitely pick her voice out of the pack.) Dusty was coming off the disappointing reception to her 1970 album, A Brand New Me, and was in the process of negotiating her way out of her contract with Atlantic Records. She passed some of her free time by singing on this track (and the last track on side one, the similarly-named “My Father’s Gun”) for her friend Elton. I’m not sure whether Elton was doing her a favor by including her or she was doing Elton a favor by jumping in; it could have been a bit of both, or maybe neither. In any case, it it was a collaboration that worked.

Interestingly, Tumbleweed Connection was the first album on which Elton’s classic rhythm section of Dee Murray (bass) and Nigel Olsson (drums) appeared. Their first track together with Elton was side two’s “Amoreena.” On “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,” Dave Glover played bass and Roger Pope played drums.

By the way, those Old West-looking photos on the album cover were not shot in America. British photographer Ian Digby Owens shot all the photos at the Sheffield Park railway station in Sussex, England, applying liberal amounts of sepia tone. The effect certainly worked on this 13 year-old when I listened to Tumbleweed Connection on my GE portable record player while pouring over those album notes.