Ray Price--"Nightlife"

From Night Life (Columbia: 1963/ Koch: 1996)

A haunting ballad pitting jazz chords against a Nashville guitar, the Willie Nelson-penned title track of Ray Price’s 1962 album is just the sort of tune you expect to hear playing (anachronistically, perhaps) on a jukebox in an Edward Hopper painting. Listen to Price’s soaring tenor as he resigns himself to the sins and frustrations of a troubled nocturnal existence and imagine the blue and red neon of seedy redneck bars reflected on the rainy sidewalks of some nameless southern city in the middle of the last century. “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” Indeed. And I won’t even make a vampire jokes.

See here for a good 1981 live performance of the song, although I'm partial to the old one.