What's your favorite lyric from a song?


Just curious what stays with people...
arthursmuck

Showing 3 responses by bander

Me and my best friend Lillian
And her blue tick hound dog Gideon,
Sittin on the front porch cooling in the shade
Singin every song the radio played
Waitin for the Alabama sun to go down
Two red dirt girls in a red dirt town
Me and Lillian
Just across the line and a little southeast of Meridian.
She loved her brother I remember back when
He was fixin up a '49 Indian
He told her 'Little sister, gonna ride the wind
Up around the moon and back again"
He never got farther than Vietnam
I was standin there with her
 When the telegram come for Lillian
Now he's lyin somewhere 
About a million miles from Meridian.
She said "There's not much hope for a red dirt girl
Somewhere out there is a great big world
That's where I'm bound
And the stars might fall on Alabama
But one of these days I'm gonna swing
My hammer down
Away from this red dirt town
I'm gonna make a joyful sound"
She grew up tall and she grew up thin
Buried that old dog Gideon
By a crepe myrtle bush in the back of the yard,
Her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard
Got in trouble with a boy from town
Figured that she might as well settle down
So she dug right in
Across a red dirt line 
Just a little south east of Meridian
Yes, she tried hard to love him
 but it never did take 
Just another way for the heart to break
So she learned to bend
One thing they don't tell you about the blues
When you got em
You keep on falling cause there ain't no bottom
And there ain't no end, at least not for Lillian.
Nobody knows when she started her skid,
She was only twenty seven and she had five kids.
Coulda' been the whiskey,
Coulda been the pills,
Coulda been the dream she was trying to kill.
But there won't be a mention in the news of the world
About the life and the death of a red dirt girl
Named Lillian
Who never got any farther across the line than Meridian
Now the stars still fall on Alabama
Tonight she finally laid
That hammer down
Without a sound
In the red dirt ground
Emmylou Harris wrote the song "Red Dirt Girl"
which is the name of the album for which she won a Grammy in 2001 for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

  • Emmylou Harris explained the background to this song on her website: "I am very, very inspired by the sound of words, and the names of places are so melodic and beautiful," she said. "I was passing through Meridian on my way down to record in New Orleans and that's what started it."

    "But what really took it over the edge for me was on a night off in New Orleans we went to see Boys Don't Cry," Emmylou continued. "It unnerved me, not only because of the violence and homophobia, but also because of the underlying theme of how trapped those young people were. We all come into this world with so much potential and so many dreams. Who knows why some people escape and other people don't? The key idea is in the lyric, 'There won't be any mentions on The News of the World.'"