Bastard Nation Lyrics
She doesn't even know her name
No one there knows where they come from
Could've been Abel could've been Cain
She was raised by loving hands
Down by the Gulf Of Mexico
Her savior was a preacher man
They loved her like she was their own
But one thing they could not give to her
Though they tried with all their might
They could not fill the emptiness
She felt when she lay down each night
She comes from the Bastard Nation
She don't even know her name
No one there knows where they come from
Could've been Abel could've been Cain
All alone in the Bastard Nation
Just like all the others there
Each one reaching out for someone
Doesn't anybody care
She'll look in her father's eyes
Somewhere in there she'll see herself
And feel all those invisible ties
But that girl from the Bastard Nation
She just seems to drift away
She never knew just where to land
It's the only thing that ever made her pray
She comes from the Bastard Nation
She doesn't even know her name
No one there knows where they come from
Could've been Abel could've been Cain
All alone in the Bastard Nation
Just like all the others there
Each one reaching out for someone
Doesn't anybody care
I think it's about an illegitimate girl raised by loving parents who adopted her. Even though they love her their love cannot alleviate the lost feeling that she has of not knowing who her parents are.
However, I did discover this from Wikipedia:
England's Statute of Merton (1235) stated, regarding illegitimacy: "He is a bastard that is born before the marriage of his parents."[2] This definition also applied to situations when a child's parents could not marry, as when one or both were already married or when the relationship was incestuous.
Under English law, a bastard was unable to be an heir to real property, in contrast to the situation under civil law, and could not be legitimized by the subsequent marriage of father to his mother.
The Legitimacy Act 1926[5] of England and Wales legitimized the birth of a child if the parents subsequently married each other, provided that they had not been married to someone else in the meantime.
In the United States, in the early 1970s a series of Supreme Court decisions held that most common-law disabilities imposed upon illegitimacy were invalid as violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Many other countries have abolished by legislation any legal disabilities of a child born out of wedlock. None of this probably mattered one bit to the girl in the song, however.