My Memories Are Worn

     I discovered the music of John Prine when I was in college.  My mother was teaching Interior Design in Morehead, Kentucky and I found a tape in the campus bookstore on one of my many trips to see her.  My favorite of his songs is Grandpa Was A Carpenter but the song Paradise stuck with me too.  There's a line in the song -  "and there's a backward old town that's often remembered so many times that my memories are worn."  That part of the song has been running through my head for days, so much so that I finally had to go to i-tunes and download it.  I wore the original tape out listening to it over and over as I drove from Knoxville to Kentucky and back home again.

Paradise
by John Prine

When I was a child my family would travel
Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn.

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
Mister 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 Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
Chorus

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and 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.
Chorus

When I die let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.
Chorus