Unknown - Paradise Muhlenberg County Lyrics

PARADISE (Muhlenberg County)

[Song by John Prine]

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

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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 Eastern Kentucky before
the area was completely demolished by the Peabody Coal Company's
stripping operations.