The Coat

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a needle and thread, if a needle and thread had a sound)

[Verse 1]
Her mother made a coat out of rags. Scraps people had given them,
sewn together in every colour there was because there was no choosing,
and while she sewed she told the child the story from the Bible
about a boy whose father loved him best and gave him a coat like that.

[Chorus]
And she went to school so proud. That's the part. She went in PROUD.
She thought she was arriving in something remarkable, because she was,
and they laughed at her — they laughed until she cried, and they shut her in a closet,
and she said sixty years later she could still feel exactly how that was.

[Verse 2]
She wrote it down in 1969, on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt,
on Porter Wagoner's tour bus, because that is what was to hand.
Porter had that receipt framed. He kept it on his wall until he died.
Of everything she ever wrote, she said this one was the one that mattered most.

[Chorus]
And she went to school so proud. And here is what she did with it —
she did not write a song about the children who laughed. They are not in it.
She wrote a song about her mother's hands and about being rich,
and let the cruelty stay a fact in the corner, unanswered, not fed.

[Bridge]
There is a museum in Sevier County with a replica of that coat in a case.
Children come through on school trips and stand in front of it,
and the guides say the same thing every time, which is that it is only rags,
and that this is the entire point, and some of them get it and some do not.

[Outro]
(the organ comes up under it)
One of many colors.
Her mother sewed it in the dark.
She went to school so proud.