East Texas Red chords by Arlo Guthrie
Verse 1
C
D
A
G
Down in the scrub oak
C
timbers of the southeast
Texas
G
Gulf
There used to ride a brakeman,
A
and a brakeman double tough
D
G
A
D
He worked the town of
G
Kilgore
And
C
G
Longview nine miles down
C
And us travelers called him
G
East
Texas
Red
D
G
The meanest bull around
If you rode by night, by broad daylight
C
G
In the wind and the snow and sun
You'd always see
Little
East
Texas
Red
A
D
Sportin' his smooth runnin' gun
G
Well the town got switched down
the stems and the mains
C
G
And everybody said
C
G
That the meanest man on the shiny irons
Was
Little
D
East
Texas
Red
G
It was early in the mornin' and along
C
G
George 9 or 10
When a couple of boys on
the hunt of a jowl
A
D
Stood in the blizzardy wind
G
Hungry and cold they knocked on the doors
C
Of the workin' folks around
G
C
G
For a piece of meat or a spud or two
D
G
To boil their stew around
Red come down the cinder dung
C
G
And he flagged down number two
He kicked their bucket over a bush
A
D
And dumped out all of their stew
G
One traveler said,
Mr.
East
Texas
C
G
Red, you better get your business fixed right,
because
C
G
you're going to ride your little black
D
train just one year from tonight.
G
Well
Red just laughed as he climbed the bank,
C
G
swung on the side of a wheeler, the boy was
took on a tanker to
Seminole
A
And westward to
D
Amarillo
G
They struck them a job of ball field work
C
G
And they followed the pipeline down
C
G
And it took them lots of places
D
G
Till one year had rolled around
On one cold and wintry day,
C
they hooked them a
Gulf -bound train
G
They shivered and they shook
with dough in their clothes
To
A
Old
Kelgore again
D
G
Over hills of sand and hard -froze roads
C
G
where the cotton wagons rode
C
Out past the town of
G
Kelgore and on to
D
O 'Longview
G
Where their warm suits of clothes
and their overcoats
C
G
They'll walk into a store
They'll pay the man for
some meat and stuff
A
D
They'll boil their stew once more
G
They walked the tides back to the yard
C
G
And they came to the same old spot
Where
C
East
Texas
G
Red just one year ago
D
G
Had dumped their last steel pot
The smoke from their fire
went higher and higher
C
And a man come down the line
G
He ducked his head in the blizzardy
A
D
wind and waved old number nine
G
He walked off down the cinder dump
C
and he'd come to the same old spot
G
C
G
And there was the same two men
D
again around that same stew pot
G
Red went to his knees and he hollered,
C
G
Please don't pull that trigger on me.
I never did get my business fixed,
A
D
Red never got his say.
G
A gun wheeled out of an overcoat
C
G
And it laid the old one to
C
Red lay dead.
G
While the other two men sat
D
G
down to eat their stew
Outro 1
C
G
D
G
East Texas Red
Arlo Guthrie
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