100 Miles From Music City

I go back to the old place after many years away
Imagine all the time I spent here just a hundred miles
From Nashville and never made the trip
Of course Nashville was a different place then
Yeah the Grand Old Opry was platitudinous and corny
Country music was still hackneyed and banal, not young and hip
And anyhow, we'd play our own music in the shade of the old oak tree
When the afternoon became too hot to work but not too hot to play guitar
And old John Walters would come down the road
He'd sing the old song acapella in his strangе keening falsetto
Drink too much of what he carried with him in that mayonnaisе jar
And tell us how they found his father in the bathtub on the day
When he was through with wondering when his lungs were going to take him
And then John would sing a song so pretty
We'd all grow quiet for a long, long time
While the sun sank towards the chicken barn
A hundred miles from Music City

I go back and the old place is just forty miles from mammoth cave
Just forty miles away and all the time I lived so close
Never even had the urge to go
I guess it's hard to see yourself give up and play the tourist
When you're close to home and anyhow
Hills behind the house were full of caves you wouldn't even know
Were there until it snowed and only then by where the snow was melted
Back from where the rock was open wide enough to slide in on your belly
Until you found the place
It dropped down to a room so big we all could turn our flashlights off
And sit in darkness so complete
That all your other senses were on fire and you had to taste
The lips of someone next to you and breathe their Doctor Bronner's soap
And wood smoke
And the only sound was the ssssss of your down parkas touching
And you felt so giddy
You drop your flashlight, listen while it rolls beyond a ledge then falls
Forever until it hits the bottom
Forty miles from mammoth cave
Hundred miles from Music City

I go back to the old place; no I never went to see the greyhounds racing
Even though the track was only fifteen miles
From where I woke up all those days and went to sleep as many nights
Without the wish to see those greyhounds race around the track
Like an unhappy metaphor for life, if I had ever lived that way
And anyhow, I had a yellow dog and he was smart and irreproachable
In all that time I never put him on a leash or even made him wear a collar
And he only ran off twice. First time he was gone two days and nights
And I have never felt so lonely as when I was walking
Through the hayfield and hollering
And hollering and bleeding from the barbed wire fence
But there he was two mornings later
Peppered full of buckshot
And the second time he ran away, well, that was it, he
Never did come back so I can't kneel beside his grave
Fifteen miles from Coleman Racetrack
Forty miles from Mammoth Cave
Hundred miles from Music City