Barmaid's Blues

Album: On The Ropes (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song from the alt-country band's fourth album, an Old West barmaid shares tales of love and loss with her last patron of the night, recalling the oil man she could have married and the time when the outlaw Jesse James shot up the bar during a poker game.

    When Honeycutters frontwoman Amanda Anne Platt wrote the tune, she wasn't watching old Westerns or drowning her sorrows in a dusty bar. "I actually wrote that song in Florida of all places, around Destin," she told Songfacts. "I forget what town I was in, but there's this little festival that happens on the panhandle called 30A, which is the road that runs out there. A lot of the year it's kind of a resort. Everyone has condos and it's on the beach. It's very beautiful. But then in January they do this little songwriters festival because a lot of people aren't down there. So they put you up in these nice condos that nobody's living in and it's really fun. But I was down there by myself one year and I was just enjoying my huge fancy beach condo to myself. I think I had that line, 'All of the gunslingers have rings on their fingers.' I was playing that for a while. It was one of those things where the moment was right and I was like, I have this song now. Now I understand what this song is about and how it needs to come together, and I was able to sit down and write it."

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