Kevin Gordon, 'Goodnight Brownie Ford' [Exclusive Premiere]

Musician Kevin Gordon is a unique artist: a singer with an MFA in poetry from the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a keen ear for swampy, soulful music. He's premiering a new song, "Goodnight Brownie Ford," exclusively for readers of The Boot.

The mellow tune chronicles Gordon's meeting of cowboy, country singer and rodeo rider Brownie Ford. It's almost six minutes long, and Gordon's soulful delivery forever immortalizes his time with the iconic country great.

""Goodnight Brownie Ford" was one of the first songs I wrote for the new record," Gordon tells The Boot. "It went through many, many revisions; I remember taking 30 different demo versions on the road with me once. I'm still amazed that that alone didn't kill off the song completely.

"Meeting Mr. Ford was special at the time but only grew more meaningful to me as time went on," Gordon continues. "I met him right before I moved to Nashville. He had a deep distrust of the music business, part of a stubborn provincialism that made him the elder trickster that he was. When writing the song, I also thought about him as a marker of a generation, now mostly gone, of people who were not only close to music but also close to the land, whose ties to both were based on plain necessity and love."

Gordon is a singing poet in the truest sense, and his fans include Lucinda Williams, the late Levon Helm, Keith Richards and more. His unique sound is crafted primarily with a 1956 Gibson ES-125 in open-D tuning, sometimes with two amps, and his unhurried style and bluesy influences are on point in "Goodnight Brownie Ford."

"Goodnight Brownie Ford" is from Gordon's forthcoming acoustic and electric record, Long Time Gone. It is scheduled to impact on Sept. 4 and is the follow-up project to his 2012 record, Gloryland. Fans can pre-order Gordon's new record via Pledge Music.

Listen to Kevin Gordon, "Goodnight Brownie Ford":

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