American alt-country artist Jenny Queen has shared the first single off her forthcoming album, Baby It Was Real And We Were The Best, a dark country-pop hymn dubbed ’50 Dollars $ilver’.
Premiering via Music Feeds below, the dreamy music video for the tune sees the singer perform inside a smoky house of mirrors, as she croons this haunting ballad about a sheriff laying dying in a Kansas town square after being shot in the guts by a bandit, and who — with his last dying action — hands his badge and gun over to a local woman.
Each song off Queen’s freshly announced LP goes hand-in-hand with an intriguing fictional tale like the one above, and the disc itself was produced by ARIA award-winner Shane Nicholson.
Watch the official music video for ’50 Dollars $ilver’, and read the full story that the song inspired, below.
Meanwhile, Queen’s first album since 2014, Baby It Was Real And We Were The Best, is due out early next year.
’50 Dollars $ilver’ – Story
The sheriff was gut-shot by Quantrill’s men and left in the middle of town square. Before he died, coughing black blood and vile curses, he handed over his badge and his Colt to The Woman.
Sheriff Hosta had admired The Woman ever since her first night in his town, when a drunk had let himself into her lodgings, britches already unbuttoned. “Pistol whipped ol’ Romeo with a mother-a-pearl derringer, what she did, almost ladylike,” Hosta would tell the other fellows at Abraham’s General Store, with a wheezing guffaw. “Put a size 5 boot in his bee-hind, then propped a chair under the knob an’ got herself a good 40 winks. Didn’t even send the bellman to wake me.”
The Woman kissed Hosta’s grizzled cheek as he lay dying, then pinned the badge to her dress. She didn’t want the job, but there was no one else to protect the blonde farm widows and their round faced little towhead babies. And so the first woman sheriff in Bloody Kansas found herself with a tin star weighing at her breast, at a time of ungodly bloodshed. Those size 5 boots were all that stood between the raiders and the town…
