submissions
| Lacy J. Dalton – Hard Times Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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Hard times is more about how your family is doing emotionally than how much money you have. Rich people can have hard times ("hard times is a daddy and a mother livin' in a mansion and hatin' each other") and poor or working-class people can have good times, even in an economic depression, if they stick together and love each other regardless off the desire for material goods or better food.
I grew up hearing this song since I was a young child, and my family always used it as a shorthand, on long car rides to see doctors that we weren't at all sure would cure anything or even treat the symptoms, that we may have been going through a rough patch but we still loved each other so everything would be okay no matter what happened. All it took was the song coming on the radio or tape deck, and we'd hold hands and know what it meant. |
submissions
| Rasputina – Bad Moon Rising (Creedence Clearwater Revival cover) Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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I never saw the point of the original song. The style didn't match the lyrics. Then I saw Rasputina perform this in concert and was blown away. Completely blown away. They made it dark and scary the way the lyrics were meant to be. Everything -- the cellos, the percussion, the singing style -- came together to make it a deliciously creepy Halloween-like song. And it was flawless and beautiful. I still have trouble believing that CCR couldn't at least try to make it sound like this. I mean, the musical style didn't exist back then, but their bland music surely could've been spiced up a bit, it could have been made scary, there were scary songs back then. I don't get it. But for Rasputina's cover, I have nothing but love. I could listen to it all day. |
submissions
| Merle Haggard – Okie from Muskogee Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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Okie is a derogatory term, but Merle Haggard has every right to use it, as do I. Because our families were part of the Okie migration to California. You can't use it on us as a bad word, but we can use it about ourselves as a term of pride. It's taking back something that was once derogatory and making it our own. My folks moved from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California in the twenties and thirties to pick cotton, which makes them Okies. You were an Okie even if you were from Arkansas, although sometimes they said Arkie too. But my folks were Okies, I'm descended from Okies, and I'm proud of it, and I'll use the term Okie any time I want. Merle Haggard has certainly earned that right himself. He's right from around the same area my folks are from -- Bakersfield, Wasco, etc. He talks like them. He moves like them. He looks like them. We're Okies, and nothing wrong with that. I agree the song was originally intended to be satirical, though, and then veered off course when people started identifying with it. Merle Haggard was hardly a pristine, law-abiding figure and he rarely tried to look like one. |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – Hello, My Name Is Coal Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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This song is from the point of view of coal itself, and points out all the contradictory ways that human beings have viewed and treated coal since we started digging it up and using it, and the toll it has taken on our lives. It's strongly implied that the coal is controlling us, rather than the other way around. Coal is presented as a savior, a temptress, a tyrant, hope, and despair, all rolled into one. |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – The Maple's Lament Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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This is from the point of view of a maple tree, remembering when it was alive, before it was made into a fiddle. No matter how beautiful the music that comes out of it now, the maple doesn't feel it was worth dying for, and feels as if it's now just a passive conduit for the music, instead of an active participant. It remembers all the things it used to be able to do and experience when it was still a tree. |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – West Virginia Mine Disaster Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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This is a pretty straightforward story of a mining disaster in West Virginia, told from the point of view of the wife of one of the miners who died. The worst part is that even after losing her husband and other members of the community in the disaster, she's going to have to send her own sons to work in the mines because they are too poor to do anything else. She can't even afford to give them the little education it would take to get them the less dangerous above-ground jobs related to the mine, they will have to dig underground, doing the most dangerous jobs in the mine, and risk the same fate as the miners who died in the disaster, including presumably their own father. The song is hauntingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly sad and maddening that we still send people to work under these conditions, and don't pay them what their effort and the danger they live under is worth. |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – The Wood Thrush\'s Song Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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She's remembering a time when the place she was standing in was in the woods, just nature with nothing manmade about it. And the wood thrush used to sing there. But now the woods have been cut down to make way for buildings and pavement and roads, and the wood thrush has gone away with them. The wood thrush represents everything pure about nature. And the singer is contrasting that purity with all the things people do to "improve" the world for ourselves. She points out that no matter how much we know and seek to understand, no matter how much humans learn and think we know, we will never understand anything as basic and natural as the way a wild bird sings. And now that the woods have been cut down to make way for progress, all she wants is to hear the wood thrush sing again, to have things be how they were before, in a more innocent time. |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – A Far Cry Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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She spend the whole song contrasting her life, on the road, always moving, never putting down roots, with the life of the man she loved, who stayed in the mountains where they were born and stayed true to his roots. She makes it sound as if her life has been full of lots of travel but little connection to the world. And his life has been rich in connections and community despite him not leaving home at all. And she's realizing this too late -- because he's dead. And now even though she's going home to visit, it will never be the same, whether she stays home or takes off wandering again. Because she's lost her one real love, and home isn't the same without him, even though she's realized the value of being home. It's still too late for her to find the fulfillment she'd have found by going home and staying with him. Now she can only go home to, presumably, his funeral, and to pay her respects to his family. (Who may well blame her for him dying unhappy.) |
submissions
| Kathy Mattea – Gone, Gonna Rise Again Lyrics
| 11 years ago
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It's about grief, and loss, and the cycle of life in nature. She's lost her grandfather, but he was thinking about the future when he died -- he planted the trees that he knew he'd never see bear fruit, because he knew his children and grandchildren would benefit. And in the end, she's looking at the trees as they grow, and thinking even when they're killed, the new wood comes up from the roots. She's comparing that to her family, saying they have deep roots that survive the death of any individual member. She's comparing the natural world, the land that her grandfather loved so much, with the world of people where she's lost her grandfather and many other relatives, but the cycle of life always goes on no matter what in both cases. |
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