Friday Song: “At the Dark End of the Street”
A song covered again and again retains its complex power even without its soul roots
By Rick Anderson
If you’re a fan of vintage soul music, then you’re likely familiar with Dan Penn and Chips Moman’s classic composition “The Dark End of the Street.” Maybe you’ve heard the original hit recording of it by James Carr from 1966, or the somewhat less commercially successful version recorded the next year by Percy Sledge.
Or maybe you’ve heard one of the other twenty or so versions that have been recorded by artists as diverse as Prince Buster, Diamanda Galás, Cat Power, and (of course) Aretha Franklin.
Why, you may well ask, have so many artists from so many different musical traditions been so attracted to this particular song?
I have a theory. Unlike most doomed-love songs, “The Dark End of the Street” is unusually emotionally and morally complex. First of all, you need to understand what the song is saying. In it, the singer (whose gender is never revealed) promises two things: first, that his or her lover can take comfort in knowing that they’ll soon be together; and second, that there is no way they’re going to get away with what they’re doing. It sounds a lot like a cheating song — it’s suffused with equal parts desire, guilt, and regret. And yet there’s nothing in the lyrics to indicate that anyone is being cheated on. What’s clear is that the couple’s love is forbidden and that they have to go to extreme lengths to conceal it, but at no point is it explained why this is the case. Maybe one or the other of them is married; maybe they’re gay; maybe their relationship is interracial (the song was written in 1966, remember); maybe they’re too far apart in age.
But the problem with this relationship seems to go far beyond mere societal disapproval. The singer acknowledges that his or her relationship is simply not right: “it’s a sin and we know it’s wrong,” the singer says, and, in tones of abject resignation, “I know that time’s gonna take its toll/We’ll have to give back all the love that we stole.” Most affecting, and honestly slightly terrifying, is the chorus: “They’re gonna find us/They’re gonna find us/They’re gonna find us someday.”
If this song were written today, it would almost certainly be very different. It would have been a song of defiance, celebrating the inevitable victory of love in the face of repression. Or maybe it would be a standard-issue cheating song, in which the singer expresses his or her inability to resist the deadly temptation of a very particular kind of forbidden fruit. But by giving us a window into the aching heart of someone who is involved in an impossible and doomed affair, and painting the emotional damage it has inflicted with bitter clarity while leaving us to fill in the specifics of the situation for ourselves, Penn and Moman created a song that completely transcended its genre boundaries and attracted singers from all over the place.
The first version time I heard “The Dark End of the Street” was in an obscure live acoustic version by Richard and Linda Thompson. The song fit Thompson’s particular style of bleakness so perfectly that it was years before I realized he hadn’t written it. I still think their version is one of the best ever. It has not a hint of soul to it whatsoever — and the fact that it’s still so devastatingly affecting is a testament to the song’s intrinsic power.