The song first appeared on the Burritos’ 1969 debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin”. The lyrics describe an indulgent yet repentant country kid’s reactions to the wild freedom of late-60s Los Angeles. It’s a beautiful country song, with lyrics about a topic that mainstream most country artists of the time steered clear of. As was much of Parsons’ work.
The Parsons documentary “Fallen Angel” quotes a band member as saying the song was inspired by old country songs that he and Parsons knew.
It consists of a verse and a chorus:
Verse 1:
This old town’s filled with sin
It’ll swallow you in
If you’ve got some money to burn
Take it home, right away
You’ve got three years to pay
But Satan, is waiting his turn
Chorus:
This old earthquake’s gonna leave me in the poorhouse
It seems like this whole town’s insane
On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door
Won’t keep out, the Lord’s burning rain
My question: what are some older country songs that the verse resembles, and therefore may have been its inspiration?
I can think of one: “There Ain’t No future in This”, by Reba McKintire. Any others?
(I mean no disrespect to Parsons by making this comparison - “Sin City” is one of my favorite songs. Many great songs in country and blues are very deriviative. The term for this is ‘tune families’, in which a song ‘gives life’ to others. Sometimes, the original is little more than a distinctive chord progression with a shred of a melody.
A classic example is the Carter Family’s, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes”, which ‘birthed’ Roy Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird” and Kitty Wells’ “It wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”.)
TIA