Multi-Colored Lady

No comments? This is a ridiculously good song, it keeps growing on me the more I listen to it. I just wonder if Gregg actually had an experience like this.

Rare for a song to elude such sympathy.

In 1973, I heard Multi Colored Lady on the jukebox in the pool hall my dad and I ran to put me thru college at LSU. The song was on the flip side of the 45RPM record that featured Midnight Rider. Rider was the big hit, so everybody dropped their dime and played that over and over - Great Song, Someone must have played Multi Colored Lady on the juke box by accident, as it was not the "money song" on that 45! Lucky me! It affected my life from that point forward. I had just started learning to play guitar at that time. I learned it, then lost touch with it, though I looked in every "record store" for all those years as there was no Internet. 45 years later, I googled it - and there it was!!I am so moved and love the song to my core - every time I pick up my my acoustic guitar now, I either play and sing it, or I think about it. It has become the song of my lifetime. I'm 69 years old, an old hippy rocker, covered every classic rock band there has been for 50 years. Yet, I always go back to the way this song made me feel when I was 18 and just finding my emotions and exploring what made me feel alive. This song made me a better person. No one has ever commented about the lady looking for a map to Death Row, or what Gregg really meant with that line. As a PhD having worked in the field of correctional education all my life, I think I have the answer. The lady was actually on the bus going to meet the young husband she has lost to the prison system in Georgia - forever! She likely was going to view his execution. At first, inconsolable, the song shows us that life goes on, Do you go on with your life, or do you spend it on a bus visiting the selfish person who put himself and his young bride in this situation until his final day. In the song, when she smiled, I felt she was going to choose living her life. This song is deep, and no one thinks about prison, let alone write a song about the circumstances that occur when a significant person is locked away. For that reason, I believe Gregg met someone, on a bus, in the rain, in that situation and it affected him so deeply, he wrote the perfect prison song. For me, it was, it is and always will be the perfect song that makes me feel a lifetime of emotion. I'm 69 years old, and when I leave work, I'm going to go home and play it. This weekend, attending a corrections conference, I will play the song for a thousand people, with just my box, my voice, and my heart. I can't wait...........