Spotted Horses / Tar & Feathers is part 2 of the Snopes Trilogy. I wrote & recorded this song in 1988 on the Taylor 555. Its a nice gritty sounding 12 in this incarnation.
The three Snopes songs focus on Eck Snopes’ boys Wallstreet Panic (aka Wall) and Admiral Dewey. Through a literary miracle of sorts, Wall survives the stampede of the spotted ponies (see below).
William Faulkner – Spotted Horses excerpt:
…“Hell fire,” the first man – his name was Freeman – said “It’s Flem Snopes.’ They were all standing when the wagon came up and stopped and Snopes got down and approached the steps. He might have departed only this morning. He wore the same cloth cap, the minute bow tie against the white shirt, the same gray trousers. He mounted the steps.
“Howdy, Flem,” Quick said. The other looked briefly at all of them and none of them, mounting the steps. “Starting you a circus?”
“Gentlemen,” he said. He crossed the gallery; they made way for him. Then they descended the steps and approached the wagon, at the tail of which the horses stood in a restive clump, larger than rabbits and gaudy as parrots and shackled to one another and to the wagon itself with sections of barbed wire. Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy, motionless, and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattle snakes, quiet as doves…
The little boy turned and ran for the wagon. The horses were whipping back and forth across the lot, as if while in the barn they had once more doubled their number; two of them rushed up quattering and galloped all over the boy again without touching him as he ran, earnest and diminutive and seemingly without progress, though he reached the wagon at last, from which Eck, his sunburned skin now a sickly white, reached down and snatched the boy into the wagon by the straps of his overalls and slammed him face down across his knees and caught up a coiled itching-rope from the bed of the wagon…