Romance in Durango
Bob Dylan song
"Romance in Durango" is the seventh song (or the second song on Side 2 of the vinyl) on Bob Dylan's 1976 album Desire. It was written by Dylan and Jacques Levy, who collaborated with Dylan on most of the songs on the album. The chorus contains several lines sung in Spanish, resulting in the song being released as a single in Spain in 1977. It was also released as a b-side to the Japanese single of "One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)" in 1976. The song was produced by Don DeVito.
Composition and recording
"Romance in Durango" is one of many narrative songs on Desire (perhaps reflecting the influence of co-writer Jacques Levy who was known primarily as a theater director). The first-person narrator tells of an adventure in Durango, Mexico, where Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Dylan both scored and acted in, had been filmed in 1972 and 1973. In their book Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon note that the "story of the song is similar to a cowboy movie scenario. An outlaw and his lover are on the run...with a posse of sheriffs and bounty hunters on their trail. But it is also a typically Dylanesque story, in the sense that the main character of the song is haunted by his murder of a close friend named Ramon".
“Romance in Durango” enters the record as bob Dylan song. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Romance, Durango and Dylan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Romance in Durango” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Romance, Durango and Dylan provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3940549. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1977, 1972 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Romance in Durango” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.