Two Favorite Songs

Been meaning to talk about two favorite songs for a while now.  One is Dan Tyminski's "Some Early Morning."  It's about a man who's wrongfully convicted of homicide.  Pretty haunting lyrics:  

It was late one night in the heart of town.

I was drinking all alone.

Ran out of cash when I paid my tabs, so I headed home.

 

The night was black, the air was thick as I wandered passed a barn.

Then a shot came out and I heard a scream beside me in the dark.

Afraid that maybe I’d be next, I started to run,

Just as fast as my feet would go, into the barrel of a gun.

 

The lawman’s light was blinding me; he said, "why’d you do it son?"

Two weeks later in the criminal court, I was up on murder one.

 ... 

 

Well I sat there in the courtroom as the tears ran down my face.

A guilty man is free somewhere and they put me in his place. 

The jury read the verdict and the judge called out my name. 

He said, "Young man, you will spend your life wearing the ball and chain." 

 

Now I’m staring at the ceiling as I lay here on my bed.

For fourteen long and lonely years, it’s where I've laid my head.

Behind these cold, gray prison walls time sure passes slow. 

And unless I die tomorrow I’ve still got a life to go. 

 

One reason I love Tymiski is his role in "Brother, Where Art Thou?"  The real musical hero of that movie is James Carter.  His sudden rise to stardom--and the check he received for his powerful song (Po Lazarus) recorded in a Mississippi penitentiary in 1959 by Alan Lomax--reminds us, as if we need such a reminder, that there are many people whose names we will never know who produce beautiful and important work. 

The other favorite song?  Old Crow Medicine Show's Big Time in the Jungle, which is, after all, about Eutaw, Alabama -- a place near my heart and at the center of my scholarly interests.

The other song is Old Crow Medicine Show's "Big Time in the Jungle." I like it for two reasons. First, it's about one of my favorite places on this planet: Eutaw, Alabama (the county seat of Greene County). Why is this such a favorite place? A couple of reasons. In part because it's a place that time has forgotten. If you want to see what an antebellum Alabama town looked like, get yourself to Eutaw. Several streets are filled with houses that have been preserved. So you can see what the world those distant inhabited looked like. And of course there's a cemetery there, too. I've spent a lot of hours walking through it, reading tombstones and admiring their art. I also love Eutaw because of the records that are contained in the county probate office. That's a story that Stephen Davis and I will be telling in great detail shortly.