Cripple Creek
Country-folk about a dying man's last journey.
Alexander 'Skip' Spence, from Oar (1969)
- Written by
- Alexander Spence
- Released
- 1969
- Length
- 2:16
- Album
- Oar
Cripple Creek is strummy country-folk in which, as No Depression put it, a man on his deathbed is visited by an angel and sets off on a surreal final journey. Louder's writer wrote that the protagonist imagines himself free of the mortal realm, with angels flying to greet him and whispering in his ear. Analog Planet quotes a line about a wheelchair left spinning deeper in the mud.
Mark Lanegan covered it on More Oar, and Jamie Lidell turned it into a skeletal funk number in Beck's Record Club.
Covers and versions
- Mark Lanegan (1999) On More Oar.
More songs by Alexander 'Skip' Spence
Little Hands, Weighted Down (The Prison Song), Books of Moses, War in Peace, Omaha
Sources
- Alexander 'Skip' Spence: Oar, No Depression (1999)
- Skip Spence, Moby Grape and Oar, Louder
- The Rear View Mirror: Alexander 'Skip' Spence's Oar, Analog Planet (2021-11-24)
- Record Club: Oar, Pitchfork (2010-03-05)