Locust Ridge

Lyrics

[Intro]
(one guitar, a long way up a dirt road)

[Verse 1]
A one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River, Sevier County, Tennessee,
January 19th, 1946, and the doctor who delivered her
was paid in a sack of cornmeal, because that is what there was,
and she was the fourth of twelve, and there was no running water.

[Chorus]
Locust Ridge. Locust Ridge.
Twelve children and two rooms and a tin roof for the rain,
and she has said, every time she was asked, that they were not unhappy —
that they were poor, which is different, and she was careful about the difference.

[Verse 2]
Her mother sang. That is where it comes from and she always said so.
Old ballads carried over from somewhere else, the murder ballads, the hymns,
sung while working, because you sing while working, that is what singing is for,
and a child in a room like that hears a thousand songs before she can read.

[Chorus]
Locust Ridge. And her uncle Bill gave her a guitar when she was eight
and she was on Knoxville radio at ten and the Opry at thirteen,
and she graduated high school and got on a bus to Nashville the next day.
The NEXT day. She has been very clear about that. She did not wait a week.

[Bridge]
And she never pretended it was anything but what it was.
She did not romanticise it and she did not use it as a wound.
She went back and bought the county, more or less, and gave people jobs in it,
and that is a harder and rarer thing than either of the easy versions.

[Outro]
(the guitar stops on the porch)
Locust Ridge.
A sack of cornmeal.
The next day.