Song Of The Week: "The Randall Knife" - Guy Clark

Of all the spoken word songs Guy Clark has penned, the ode to his father, “The Randall Knife,” is the best one. More than simply a love letter to his deceased father, the song is a paean to connecting with a parent and a reflection on the way that we invest objects with emotion—in the case of Clark, his father’s Randall knife.

Those familiar with Clark’s catalogue will know that there are two versions of the song out there, the shuffling, almost smiling cut off of Clark’s 1983 album Better Days and then the somber on released 12 years later on Clark’s 1995 Dublin Blues. But while the first version averts the depth and sadness of the lyrics, the version on Dublin Blues demonstrates that sometimes songs require not an extra line or a variation on the melody, but some protracted reflection on their themes, in order to be complete.

Indeed, Clark’s legacy will reside in the Dublin Blues version of the song, a take that not only fully embraces the weird complexity of the knife, but allows us to sit closer to Clark in the aural space of the song. The notion of ‘stripping-down’ a song is one that I harp on fairly often in my posts on Pueblo Waltz and this one will be no exception; the removal of the heavier mix found on the Better Days version of the song results in an elegant slimming, not an ungainly weight change.

Crucially, this ‘strip-down’ allows us to focus on the lyrics, which feel slightly trodden upon by the arrangement in the first version. The second version allows the listener to fully embrace the weird complexity of the knife, perhaps the most famous lyrical symbol in Clark’s catalogue (slotting in right above “the cape” and the “coat from the cold”). What impresses me about Clark’s knife is its status as an object of memory. It is, as Clark frankly points out, not a tool—“almost cutting his [father’s] thumb off / when he took it for a tool”—but an object “made for darker things.”

Clark leaves those “darker things” to imagination, only offering in passing the fact that his father took the knife with him to fight during World War II. But whether the blade was ever used to kill —is somewhat of a moot point, because the knife sat in a drawer for most of Clark’s life, not being used at all, living as a knife vested with memory more generally, not the memory of blood. Besides his father’s almost thumb-removal, the only time Clark notes it having been used is when he takes it with him to a Boy Scout jamboree, breaking “half an inch off, trying to stick it in a tree” (if the “Jamboree” / “in a tree” rhyme sounds like mine, it isn’t—Clark owns that cleverness).

The emotional center of the knife’s journey—the memory stuck to it—is the forgiveness shown by Clark’s father when the Boy Scout admits to breaking the blade. His father shows no anger, putting it away in a desk drawer “without a hard word one.” Clark doesn’t on those five words in the first version quite the way the does in the second, punching each one home with a solemn weight behind it.

At the end of the song, Clark does not claim that he ‘understood’ his father, but rather that he “found a tear for [his] father’s life / and all that it stood for.” Looking at the lyrics, it’s hard to say whether or not Clark achieved and ‘understanding’ of his father in that moment—it’s even harder to say whether or not we achieve any kind of understanding. But I don’t think that we, as listeners, are expected to see into the character of Clark’s father. All we can do is recognize the way in which simple objects can mediate our relationships with others, particularly after death.