One Million Dollars

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a plain piano figure. No fuss anywhere in this song.)

[Verse 1]
April 2020. She had a friend who was a surgeon at Vanderbilt,
and she rang him and asked what was needed, which is a rare phone call,
and she gave a million dollars to the research fund there,
and did not put out a press release, and put a note about it on the internet instead.

[Chorus]
One million dollars. And the fund helped underwrite early Moderna work,
and her name is in the acknowledgements of the New England Journal paper,
which is the single strangest sentence in the whole of this record —
a country singer from a one-room cabin, cited in a vaccine trial.

[Verse 2]
And when it came out and people made a fuss, she was embarrassed by the fuss.
She said she just wanted to do good and did not know it would be that.
She waited her turn for the shot. She would not take an early one.
She filmed herself getting it and changed the words of her own song for the joke.

[Chorus]
One million dollars. And here is what I keep coming back to about her giving:
she never once made you audition for it. Not the books, not the fire money, not this.
No sermon attached. No conditions. No photograph of her handing over a cheque.
She had a horror of making people feel small while helping them, and it shows in every case.

[Bridge]
She turned down the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice.
First time her husband was ill. Second time she did not think she had earned it.
Then she said maybe she would take it now if they asked again, and laughed,
and said she would probably have to do something to deserve it first.

[Outro]
(the piano finishes the phrase and stops)
One million dollars.
Her name is in the paper.
She waited her turn.