Some song lyrics

Listening to music, probably over-analyzing the lyrics, but maybe it's fair considering that Dylan won the Nobel for literature. One of John Prine's great songs is "Angel from Montgomery," about a woman in a stale marriage in Montgomery, Alabama. Her complaints include this about her husband:

How the hell can a person
Go to work in the mornin'
And come home in the evenin'
And have nothin' to say?

Bonnie Raitt, when she covers the song, seems unanswerable, but if you just set down the words, and think of jobs you might have had, I feel like the poor guy deserves a defense. I've now come to the end of my complaints about the lyrics to John Prine songs.

I have zero niggling complaints about the lyrics to this song on a similar theme, by Emmylou Harris. I'll set them down, but first, the footnotes. The "Indian" in the song refers to a motorcycle make, like a Harley, except it's a 1949 Indian. Meridian is a town in eastern Mississippi. Its population is only about 40,000, but if you make it the center of a circle with a radius of 85 miles, Meridian is the biggest town in the circle—it's 88 miles to Hattiesburg, which has a population of about 47,000, and around 20 miles east to the Alabama state line: "a little southeast of Meridian" puts you in rural west central Alabama. The annual college football game between in-state rivals Alabama and Auburn is called the Iron Bowl on account of the high iron content in the state's soil, which gives it a red tint. The song's lyrics:

Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon
Sitting on the front porch, cooling in the shade
Singing every song the radio played
Waiting for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town, me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.

She loved her brother, I remember back when
He was fixing up a '49 Indian
He told her, little sister, going to ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again.
But he never got farther than Vietnam
I was standing there with her when the telegram come 
For Lillian. Now he's lying somewhere
About a million miles from Meridian.

She said, "There's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound.
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm going to swing my hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm going to make a joyful sound."

She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush at the back of the yard
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line
Just a little southeast of Meridian.

Well, she tried to love him
But it never did take
It was just another way for the heart to break
So she learned to bend
One thing they don't tell you about the blues when you got them
You keep on falling, there ain't no bottom,
And there ain’t no end. At least not for Lillian.

No one could tell when she started her skid
She was just 27 and she had five kids
Could've been the whiskey, could've been the pills
Could've been the dreams she was trying to kill
But there won't be a mention in the News of the World
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther
Across the line than Meridian.

Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid that hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground.

I guess Harris was the valedictorian of her high school class and, at college, an English major, which may account for some compositional aspects of the song—for example, the way in which the theme of stunted lives is introduced in the brother's story and then, in the longer account of Lillian's life, deepened with details related in parallel phrases: "going to ride the wind"—"going to make a joyful sound"—"never got farther than Vietnam"—"never got farther across the line than Meridian." Here is a video of her performing "Red Dirt Girl" for a live audience in . . . 2000 (yikes). 

 

 

Comments

[Iner Lednab]

I bumped into your comments about Edmund Wilson and Edna St. Vincent Millay through "the google", while watching a biography of the latter on YouTube and then meandered through your "Catcher in the Rye" post (even the SparkNotes are a bore) to this lovely piece of writing about the poetry of Emmy Lou Harris and listened to her performance. I have spent worse Sunday afternoons.... Thank you.