Album: The Royal Scam (1976)

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• Babs and Clean Willie were in love they said
  So in love the preacher's face turned red
  Soon everybody knew the thing was dead
  He shouts, she bites, they wrangle through the night
  
  She go crazy
  Got to make a getaway
  Papa say
  
  [Chorus]
  Oh - no hesitation
  No tears and no hearts breakin'
  No remorse
  Oh - congratulations
  This is your Haitian Divorce
  
  She takes the taxi to the good hotel
  Bon march¨¦ as far as she can tell
  She drinks the zombie from the cocoa shell
  She feels alright, she get it on tonight
  Mister driver
  Take me where the music play
  Papa say
  
  [Chorus]
  
  At the Grotto
  In the greasy chair
  Sits the Charlie with the lotion and the kinky hair
  When she smiled, she said it all
  
  The band was hot so
  They danced the famous Merengue
  Now we dolly back
  Now we fade to black
  
  Tearful reunion in the USA
  Day by day those memories fade away
  Some babies grow in a peculiar way
  It changed, it grew, and everybody knew
  Semi-mojo
  Who's this kinky so-and-so?
  Papa go
  
  [Chorus] Writer/s: DONALD JAY FAGEN, WALTER CARL BECKER
  Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group
  Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Comments: 10

• AnonymousThe guitar solo was not played by Dean Parks but by Larry Carlton!
• Dave Yelland from CornwallIron Man is absolutely not a talkbox. It is ring modulation. Given when it was recorded, most likely from an EMS VCS3 (the Dark side of the moon synth).
• Chris from Springfield, IlHusband cheats. Wife wants a divorce. Her father says rich people don’t get divorced. So she cheats with a black dude (Haitian divorce) and gets pregnant with a mixed child, humiliating husband who then wants a divorce. Father says rich people don’t get divorced.
• Drew from Somewhere In NyOld entry, but... "processed it through a talkbox to his specifications." To clarify: Walter Becker ran an output from the original solo track through a Talk Box, which basically is a speaker in a box that blows air pressure (the sound) up a tube into the user's mouth. Becker then articulated his jaw and lips to shape the sound (Processing?), which then exited his mouth and was picked up by a microphone, and recorded to an alternate track.
• Sam from GenevaThe ‘Papa’ in the song is Papa Doc, Haiti’s then dictator who promoted tourism packages that threw-in the ‘divorce’. The ironic rif on paternity is a given.
• Paul Corusoe from United States“Haitian Divorce” is Steely Dan’s musical soap opera about the travails of a spoiled young woman acting on the advise of her father by seeking a quick divorce in Haiti to end her unhappy, mutually abusive marriage. Sung in Donald Fagan’s inimitable sardonic style (no sympathy whatsoever for any of the characters in this nasty little tale) the young woman’s situation goes from bad to worse when she returns from Haiti to her husband in the U.S. without a divorce, and pregnant as the result of a one night stand with a man she met in a Haitian club. When the child is born, her husband angrily questions her about its paternity, and gossip spreads among the couple’s acquaintances.
• Bnw from PortlandO.K. she's pregnant, who's is it, "Who's this kinky so and so?"
• Kuen-wah Cheung from BrightonAlso the first Steely Dan song I ever heard. On Radio 5. Happily I managed to record it and it took me a year or so later to discover the name of the band, and then began buying their music.
• James Watts from BarnetThe first SD song I ever heard - I was playing pool in the Plough pub near Brentwood and it blew me away - what a team!
• Nathe from Sl,utThis is a great description. Especially for those who are too young to remember the 70’s

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