A spoken-word piece about childhood in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where the Green River once felt like paradise. Coal mining by Mr. Peabody's company stripped the timber, poisoned the air, and left the land scarred. The narrator asks to return to that lost place, ending with a wish for his ashes to float down the river.
Chapters
When I was a child, my family would travel down to western Kentucky where my parents were born. There's a backwards old town that's often remembered so many times that the memories were worn. And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County down by the Green River where paradise lay? Oh, yes, son. Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away. Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River to the abandoned old prison down by Edgery Hill, where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols, but empty pop bottles was all we would kill. And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where paradise lay? Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train done hauled it away. Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel, and they tortured the timber Stripped all the land. Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken. Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man. And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where paradise lay? Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking. Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled him away. When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River. Let my soul roll up onto the Rochester Dam. I'll be halfway to heaven with paradise waiting just 5 miles away from wherever I am. And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where paradise lay? I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late. And asking, Mr. Peabody's culture has rotted away.
