Thirsty Boots

Song written by Eric Andersen

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Thirsty Boots

Written by Eric Andersen, 1965

Some songs are about marching, and some are about coming home after the march. “Thirsty Boots” is one of the gentle ones, a song of welcome for someone returning tired from a hard road. Eric Andersen wrote it during the civil rights years, when young people from all over the country were traveling South to register voters and stand up for equal rights. In the liner notes of his album, he said he wrote it for a friend who had done civil rights work, adding, “Having never gone down to Mississippi myself, I wrote the song about coming back.” That’s what gives it such tenderness. Instead of describing the struggle, it offers a friend a place to sit down, rest, and be looked after for a while.

Andersen was part of the lively Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, and he made his debut at Gerdes Folk City in 1964 in a live audition for Vanguard Records. His friend and fellow songwriter Phil Ochs had a hand in the song’s beginnings. Andersen first sang part of it to Ochs in the 14th Street subway station as the two headed down to the Village, and he has said Ochs encouraged him to finish it.

The finishing touch came in a delightfully unlikely place. Judy Collins has told audiences over the years that Andersen wrote the song’s last verse on a matchbook cover while sitting in her bathroom, and Andersen tells the same story himself in the documentary Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation. Collins clearly liked what came out of that bathroom. She was the first to release the song, in 1965, on her Fifth Album, a year before Andersen’s own version appeared on his 1966 album ‘Bout Changes ‘n’ Things. Her lovely, clear-voiced recording is the one many people first heard, and it helped carry the song well beyond the coffeehouses.

“Thirsty Boots” was never a hit single, but it became something longer-lasting: a song that other musicians love to sing. It’s one of Andersen’s best-known songs, and it has been recorded by John Denver, Anne Murray, and the Kingston Trio, among others. Even Bob Dylan took a turn at it. He recorded the song in 1970 for his Self Portrait album, but it was left off the final record and stayed on the shelf until 2013, when it came out on The Bootleg Series Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait. More than half a century after it was written, it’s still a quiet favorite, a song that reminds us to take care of the people who take care of the world.