Honolulu O’ Dughi is back with “The Ballad Of Davy O’ Dwyer,” a story-song single from the upcoming album “Phoenix Song Dogs.” The record builds upon his approach to storytelling, centering on a group of characters linked to one another in a homeless community in Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
This is a song about the life of Davy O’ Dwyer, a homeless Vietnam War veteran, from the point of view of the narrator, a taxi driver called Coyote Jack. The narrator shifts from detached observation to lived participation, and personal distance collapses into empathy as he becomes connected to the community he once simply passed.
The song has a folk base with a definite Woody Guthrie, John Prine, and Bob Dylan influence. The arrangement is based around acoustic textures and subtle instrumentation to allow the story to take the lead. “The Ballad Of Davy O’ Dwyer” is a meditation on displacement and memory, and it reaffirms the relevance of narrative folk in contemporary storytelling. It’s human in focus, multi-dimensional in its view of lives often neglected by society, and it lingers.
