Live 30 Oct 2005 version
[Spoken intro:] Thanks. I wrote uh... I wrote this song, I wrote a series of songs in California, when I lived in California. My folks moved out West about... in 1969. So they lived out there for thirty, years up in the Bay Area. And uh, I ended up living down south for a while, and I'd visit them and I'd drive up through the Central Valley and I'd stop by all the rural farm towns. And, and as lived there for the uh... mid-, early nineties and mid-nineties there were just, there were just so much uh, border reporting and, and, and, and uh... uh, immigration news in the, in the papers. And I'd written a series of songs at the end of the Tom Joad record and I wrote this song as a sequel. It's about every, every year there's hundreds of people that die trying to come across the southern border. They die in the rivers, they drown, and they died crossing the desert in a particularly hot summer. And uh... they, they make this very, very, this incredibly difficult journey. And if you eat strawberries or, or lettuce or eggplant or tomatoes or, or anything that, that can't be machine-harvested. All those crops still can't be machine-harvested. They've gotta be picked, particularly, and uh, if you anything of those things, usually the folks whose are at your table. So we need a humane immigration policy. And uh... I wrote, wrote this song backwards. It starts at the end. It starts with the body at the bottom of the river. Traces the man's journey across the desert to the banks of Matamoros, just a town across from Brownsville, Texas. This is "Matamoros Banks".
For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound
Past the playgrounds and the empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars
The clothes give way to the current and river stone
'Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
And the things of the earth they make their claim
That the things of heaven may do the same
Goodbye, my darling, for your love I give God thanks
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Over rivers of stone and ancient ocean beds
Walking thin on the twine and tire tread
My pockets full of dust, my mouth filled with cool stone
The pale moon opens the earth to its bones
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
The touch of your loving fingertips
Well meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Your sweet memory comes on the evening wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again
The lights of Brownsville across the river shine
A shout rings out and into the silty red water I dive
I long, my darling, for your kiss, for your sweet love I give God thanks
A touch of your loving fingertips
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Hey meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros
Meet me on the Matamoros banks
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
Hoo hoo...
[Spoken outro:] Thank you very much.
The above lyrics are for the live 30 Oct 2005 performance of MATAMOROS BANKS at TD Banknorth Garden in Boston, MA, during the Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour. The song was played solo on guitar and harmonica.
Pro-shot video of the entire live 30 Oct 2005 performance of MATAMOROS BANKS was posted on Bruce Springsteen's YouTube channel on 23 Dec 2019. The video was released to promote Project Adelante, a charity that helps asylum-seekers waiting in Matamoros, Mexico.
List of available versions of MATAMOROS BANKS on this website:
MATAMOROS BANKS [Album version]