If you take Interstate Highway 15 through the Mojave Desert out towards Las Vegas, Nevada, or Route 66, you will see signs that urge you to stop in the middle of the desert to see a famous ghost town called Calico. You turn off on a road surface full of potholes, go three miles north of Yerme, California, past abandoned gas stations, Calico Cal's rock and doll shop and joshua trees until you come to a gate. Immediately before you are strange mountains, which are every color of the rainbow. Just below them you will find Calico, a town of dirt streets and adobe buildings. If you don't look closely, you won't get very excited about this old silver mining town. After all, it's been turned into a commercialized tourist fantasy, complete with souvenir T-shirts, "humorous" signs with backward lettering, and an air-conditioned restaurant. But if you look just below the surface of this attempt to make Calico a pleasant place to buy ice-cream, you will see the faces of wealth-crazed, hard-drinking silver miners who first came to this god-forsaken place in the desert in 1881, hoping to become millionaires overnight. Very few actually got rich. Most of them lived almost tortured lives working underground, and the only time they got close to silver was when they were picking and shoveling it, not spending it. The complications of the mining and the greed of the few who would not share with the whole town soon killed Calico.
      Just before the turn of the century, Calico was a booming town on the desert. A few years later, it was deserted. Today it is a monument to the kind of commercialism that hides true history; but it is also a monument to the fact that mother earth can only give so much. In the songs that follow, we have tried to get the feel of the joy and tragedy that was the real Calico. Each song deals with a seperate fragment of the life of Calico, and if these fragments do not fit together like a jig saw puzzle, that is because we feel that the picture of history, as we see it now, is like a vague old daguerreotype photograph. Most of the story is lost forever, and only our imaginations can fill in the washed out, stained faces in the portrait.

    -- Michael Martin Murphey, 1972 (from the liner notes to the album "Kenny Rogers and The First Edition Present 'THE BALLAD OF CALICO'" (Reprise Records 2XS 6476, © 1972; now out of print.)

The songs:

1. Sunrise Overture (instrumental)
2. Calico Silver
3. Write Me Down (Don't Forget My Name)
4. The Way It Used To Be
5. Madame DeLil and Diabolical Bill
6. School Teacher
7. Road Agent
8. Sally Grey's Epitath
9. Dorsey, The Mail Carrying Dog
10. Harbor For My Soul
11. Calico Saturday Night (instrumental)
12. Trigger Happy Kid
13. Vachel Carling's Rubilator
14. Empty Handed Compadres
15. One Lonely Room
16. Rockin' Chair Theme (instrumental)
17. Old Mojave Highway
18. Man Came Up From Town
19. Calico Silver (reprise)