“Jeff Davis County Blues” takes a specific route through Texas but offers only a haze of a person’s life.

 

Track: “Jeff Davis County Blues”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

I once drove from El Paso to Fort Stockton, which intersects with the route described in “Jeff Davis County Blues” only briefly, right at the start. A fan made a map of the route here, and it’s interesting to take a look as you listen to the song. It doesn’t really matter where this narrator is driving, but the choice to list it like a map in the song’s lyrics does beg you to view it like one. I was driving this route in 2008 as part of a much larger drive, but I will always remember this part of Texas as even more wide open than Kansas, where we’d just been, and how that surprised me.

Assuming our narrator takes this exact route, they’re driving about five hours and taking a particularly indirect route. “I have no place to go,” they tell us, but they also say they are going to Midland. Over the drive, the narrator seems to decide that home is something they deserve (or at least desire) to come back to, after all. We don’t know why they aren’t there, but we know they spent three days in jail before the song’s events. We don’t know all that much for certain, but we’ve got a lot of clues.

The photographs on the passenger seat are the biggest clue. This is someone who wants what may be lost and they are visualizing it, quite literally. They are going home, but also they say “I hope you won’t mind.” There’s an inkling there, and maybe much more than that, of an idea that this person isn’t welcome in Midland. We don’t know what’s coming next, but we do know that this person’s fears might be justified.