Literary Evolution: The 416th Greatest Song of All Time

 

Celebrated member of the Eagles, Don Henley, had a few hits of his own and The Boys of Summer was his second.

Tom Petty's collaborator wrote the music, but its style didn't fit the album that Petty was working on at the time, so it got offered to Henley, who wrote some words about a guy whose heart was broken and sha-boom sha-boom...hitsville.

However...

The title is not original with Henley. The Boys of Summer was a 1972 book by Roger Kahn about the Brooklyn Dodgers, who broke their fans' hearts when they moved to Los Angeles.

However...

That book got its title from Dylan Thomas' 1939 poem, I See the Boys of Summer, about...um...about...well, here's the first verse:

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Lay the gold tithings barren,

Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;

There in their heat the winter floods

Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,

And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

Yeah, I don't get it either, but apparently, the evolutionary concept of getting more precise and defined over a period of time applies to works of written art.