Digital Tradition Mirror

Paradise or Muhlenberg County

(This score available as ABC, SongWright, PostScript, PNG, or PMW, or a MIDI file)
Pennywhistle notation and Dulcimer tab for this song is also available

Paradise or Muhlenberg County
(John Prine)
(G) G - C G / G C G C7 G / G - C G / G C G D7 G

When I was a child, my family would travel
Down to western Kentucky where my parents were born
And there's a backwoods old town that's often remembered
So many times that my memories are worn

     And daddy, won't you take be back to Muhlenberg County
     Down by the Green river where Paradise lay
     Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
     Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

Well sometimes we'd travel right down the Green river
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrien hill.
Where  the  air  smelled like snakes, and  we'd  shoot  with  our
pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
     CHORUS

Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal 'till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

     CHORUS

When I die, let my body float down the Green River
Let my soul drift on down to the Rochester Dam
I'll be half-way to Heaven with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles from Heaven wherever I am.
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Words and music by John Prine, copyright 1971 Walden Music, Inc.
and Sour Grapes Music, all rights reserved.

Recorded on his first album, Voices from the Mountains

Paradise is - or was - an actual town in Kentucky before
the area was completely demolished by the Peabody Coal Company's
stripping operations.DC
DC

Thanks to Mudcat for the Digital Tradition!