Here comes a jagged version of “South Coast,” by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot (who here titles it ‘South Coast is a Wild Coast’ - written by Lillian Bos Ross, Sam Eskin, Richard Dehr, and Frank Miller). This song has a complicated history, I hear, complicated further by plenty of folk manipulation by its many singers over the years. To the point that “authorship” is maybe a little vague on this one. But Elliot rips into this one pretty well and the result is that a soft-handed lilly-white like me can start to feel the desolation and harshness and terror and beauty of El Sur at a time before there was much settlement at all.

The song was built from a poem written in 1926, 11 years before the opening of the Coast Highway in 1937, and a time when most of the area was inaccessible to vehicular traffic and, in fact, could feasibly have been blank on maps¹. And so goes the story…

A man named Lonjano de Castro rides 40 miles from (~30-60 miles outside of?) his Monterey homestead to Jolon, California every Friday for some grub and mail. Oh, and wives! Can’t forget wives - on one of these trips he wins one in a card game. Like happens from time to time. Ooh, and it was very romantic - here’s their trip back to Monterey:

Well, cold feet, ya know?

So the wife doesn’t seem super jazzed about being heaped over the ass of a steed like a sack of coffee beans, but she comes around but fast (because what could be easier):

Some suggest that despite the circumstance the beauty of Big Sur and the South Coast wins over the young bride and all is well. Others prefer to read “I knew she loved me the most” as a yearning delusion by the narrator cowboy. Probably, though, it’s just a fantastic literary trumping and trampling of reality. Besides – and not for nothin’ – we’re reminded repeatedly that a lion still rules the barranca and that the South Coast is a wild coast. So…tough shit, lady. Wild coast and all.

Tougher shit than that, tho – one night the cowboy is injured in a landslide and “like lightning” the wife saddles up and alights for Jolon:

Whoopsie daisy. Or, maybe, an unavoidable conclusion to living domestically where living shouldn’t be done at all - out where the untameable foe of nature will always reset life to null. And better still in a way that leaves the cowboy to be his own very icon of wild loneliness. Or some bullshit like that - prolly that chick was fleeing to Jolon, seizing an obvious opportunity for escape.

MAPPING IT

“Down the hills” when returning to Monterey from Jolon suggests that de Castro and his new daughterbride might have ridden the Nacimiento Trail - now kinda sorta the Nacimiento-Fergusson Rd. but actually more like Big Sur’s (first of two) Mill Creek Trails, but why start out “to the south”? Nacimiento goes east-west, not very north-south at all and leading south is opposite of Monterey anyway. So this one is a little tricky to map. To the rescue a little comes William Reynolds, writing in Ranch and Reata Magazine. Tying together Lillian Bos Ross’ The Stranger and her “South Coast” poem, Reynolds basically tells us exactly where this song goes - a ranch somewhere in Big Sur between Monterey and Jolon that had originally inspired Ross to write de Castro’s narrative. Trouble is…where the fuxk is that?! Based on the crudely-drawn map Reynolds reproduces in that article, how about ~40m north of Jolon near Barlow Flat. K?

HEARING IT

There’s a subdued, ballady version of this on an official Elliot album, but his performance at Whelan’s in Dublin is so good you gotta download it like a caveperson.