The Streets of Laredo

Late last week I took a short trip to Laredo, Texas and while downtown I snapped this photograph with my cell-phone:


The photo is of Juarez Street, looking north from the intersection with Zarzamora. This downtown street is part of a commercial district near one of two international bridges linking Laredo with its cross-border sister city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.

For those who may be reading this blog for the first time, Laredo is my birthplace. I was born there in 1975 and lived there during my teenage years from 1988 to 1993. My mother's side of the family is from Laredo and I am a direct descendant of the man who founded the city in 1755: Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Garza.

While I was in Laredo that day, temperatures were up close to 100 degrees, but as I left downtown the thermometer on my truck read 111 degrees, probably from being in direct sunlight. Nevertheless, Laredo was the same hot, dusty town it's always been, ever since it was populated by settlers struggling to eke out a living on the South Texas plain.

The title of this post will sound familiar to those who recall an old western song by the same name, or perhaps by its alternate name, "The Cowboy's Lament." Here is Johnny Cash's version of the tune:



The origins of the song are a bit murky, but a nineteenth-century Irish song entitled "The Bard of Armagh" was sung to the same melody. Here are its first two verses:

Oh list' to the lay of a poor Irish harper,

And scorn not the strings in his old withered hands,

But remember those fingers, they once could move sharper,

To raise up the strains of his dear native land.

It was long before the shamrock, dear Isle's lovely emblem,

Was crushed in its beauty by the Saxon's lion paw,

And all the pretty colleens around me would gather,

Called me their bold Phelim Brady, the Bard of Armagh.

Both songs harken to distant, difficult times when life was much shorter, violent, and less luxurious than today. The daily grind of life may often be dispiriting, but we should be mindful that oftentimes our ancestors faced far greater challenges and discomforts.