I used to listen to song a lot with my parents house on audio cassette tape as a kid, and somehow it felt really good on this wet winter night. It's 50 years old now, although when I listened to the song, it was only about 15 years old.
I used to sit and listen to this song a lot when fishing 🎣 down at Lake Champlain when I was a student at Plattsburgh State.
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It's hard to imagine that for me that September 11th attacks were half a lifetime ago for me -- back when I was 18 years old and a freshman in college. But so it was. A very different time, I remember hearing this song a lot driving back and forth to HVCC listening to WGNA Country 107.7 radio. In some ways, the song seems a bit dated, but then again so does most things from two decades. Regardless, it's a good song.
"Thirsty Boots" is a Civil Rights era folksong by American singer-songwriter Eric Andersen that first appeared on his 1966 album 'Bout Changes 'n' Things. According to the album's liner notes, the song "was written to a civil rights worker-friend. Having never gone down to Mississippi myself, I wrote the song about coming back."
The song, one of Andersen's best known, has been covered by artists such as Judy Collins, John Denver, Anne Murray, and The Kingston Trio. In various stage appearances, Collins has claimed that Andersen wrote the song's last verse on a matchbook cover while in her bathroom.[citation needed]. Eric Andersen tells this story himself in the documentary Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation[1] Bob Dylan also recorded this song for his album Self Portrait, but it did not make the final cut. However, it was released as a 7" vinyl single in April 2013 from Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series Vol. 10.
Andersen has stated in interviews that Phil Ochs encouraged him to finish the song, and later recordings of "Boots" were dedicated to the late folksinger.