Of all the spoken word songs Guy Clark has penned, the ode to his father, “The Randall Knife,” is the best one. More than simply a love letter to his deceased father, the song is a paean to connecting with a parent and a reflection on the way that we invest objects with emotion—in the case of Clark, his father’s Randall knife.
Those familiar with Clark’s
catalogue will know that there are two
versions of the song out there, the shuffling, almost smiling cut off of
Clark’s 1983 album Better Days and
then the somber on released 12 years later on Clark’s 1995 Dublin Blues. But while the first version averts the depth and
sadness of the lyrics, the version on Dublin
Blues demonstrates that sometimes songs require not an extra line or a
variation on the melody, but some protracted reflection on their themes, in
order to be complete.
Indeed, Clark’s legacy will
reside in the Dublin Blues version of
the song, a take that not only fully embraces the weird complexity of the
knife, but allows us to sit closer to Clark in the aural space of the song. The
notion of ‘stripping-down’ a song is one that I harp on fairly often in my
posts on Pueblo Waltz and this one will be no exception; the removal of the
heavier mix found on the Better Days
version of the song results in an elegant slimming, not an ungainly weight
change.
Crucially, this ‘strip-down’
allows us to focus on the lyrics, which feel slightly trodden upon by the
arrangement in the first version. The second version allows the listener to
fully embrace the weird complexity of the knife, perhaps the most famous
lyrical symbol in Clark’s catalogue (slotting in right above “the cape” and the
“coat from the cold”). What impresses me about Clark’s knife is its status as
an object of memory. It is, as Clark frankly points out, not a tool—“almost
cutting his [father’s] thumb off / when he took it for a tool”—but an object
“made for darker things.”
Clark leaves those “darker
things” to imagination, only offering in passing the fact that his father took
the knife with him to fight during World War II. But whether the blade was ever
used to kill —is somewhat of a moot point, because the knife sat in a drawer
for most of Clark’s life, not being used at all, living as a knife vested with
memory more generally, not the memory of blood. Besides his father’s almost
thumb-removal, the only time Clark notes it having been used is when he takes
it with him to a Boy Scout jamboree, breaking “half an inch off, trying to
stick it in a tree” (if the “Jamboree” / “in a tree” rhyme sounds like mine, it
isn’t—Clark owns that cleverness).
The emotional center of the
knife’s journey—the memory stuck to it—is the forgiveness shown by Clark’s
father when the Boy Scout admits to breaking the blade. His father shows no
anger, putting it away in a desk drawer “without a hard word one.” Clark
doesn’t on those five words in the first version quite the way the does in the
second, punching each one home with a solemn weight behind it.
At the end of the song, Clark does
not claim that he ‘understood’ his father, but rather that he “found a tear for
[his] father’s life / and all that it stood for.” Looking at the lyrics, it’s
hard to say whether or not Clark achieved and ‘understanding’ of his father in
that moment—it’s even harder to say whether or not we achieve any kind of understanding. But I don’t think that we, as
listeners, are expected to see into the character of Clark’s father. All we can
do is recognize the way in which simple objects can mediate our relationships
with others, particularly after death.
