This haunting ballad tells the tragic story of Jo, a vibrant nineteen-year-old whose life is brutally cut short by the abusive man she refuses to leave. The song opens with a powerful, ominous image: Jo draped in innocent white as a black crow—a classic harbinger of doom—shrieks a warning that the mail boat, her symbolic chance for escape from the Irish port of Dun Leary, is departing. This warning echoes throughout the song as a desperate, recurring chorus from a narrator who can see the grim future clearly. Despite the glaring red flags—the man’s drunkenness, his cheating and lying concealed behind the respectable facade of Donegal tweed, and her own mother’s blunt pleas—Jo stays, trapped in a cycle of violence that escalates to the loss of a child and, finally, her own murder after a petty bet.

The narrative meticulously charts the devastating progression of domestic terror, emphasizing the cruel contrast between the man’s outwardly “classy” appearance and his savage, ape-like nature. Each beating is met with his sadistic smile, a chilling detail that underscores the profound evil Jo faces. Her decision to “stick around” leads to the ultimate, irreversible consequence: her death and burial in the hills overlooking the town. The aftermath is a ghostly quiet, where the memory of her laughter and spirit lingers in the still, snowy evenings, a poignant reminder of the vibrant life extinguished.

In its final, devastating twist, the song’s refrain transforms from a frantic warning into a stark epitaph. The last chorus changes key lyrics, declaring “forget the bags, now you’ll face your doom,” and confirms “the mail boat departed Dun Leary at noon.” This shift seals the song’s meaning, moving it from a cautionary plea to a funeral lament. It underscores the terrible finality of missed opportunities and the haunting price of ignoring the cries for help—whether from a mother, a friend, or even the ugly scream of a crow on a perch.

Run Away Jo!

This evocative lyric paints a portrait of a relationship strained by a partner’s profound and unspoken trauma. The narrator is haunted by an unsettling quality they perceive—something “dark and vile” lingering behind the other’s smile, eyes, and silence. This hidden pain is a palpable, almost physical presence that disturbs the narrator, creating fear and distance. Through imagery of locked doors and unextinguished candles, the chorus frames this secret as a terrifying, unexplored history—a sealed-off room within the partner’s soul that radiates a disturbing energy even in its concealment.

As the song progresses, the mystery deepens and the narrator’s apprehension grows into dread. The partner’s entire being seems enveloped by this darkness, especially in the private space of their home, where a “sadness roar” is felt more than heard. The absence of parental figures—“Mother isn’t speaking / Father can’t be found”—combined with the ominous creaking of floorboards, suggests a family history marred by abandonment or silence, intensifying the atmosphere of unresolved grief and isolation. The partner’s profound silence becomes its own terrifying language, speaking volumes about the weight of what is buried.

The final verse delivers a pivotal revelation: the narrator believes they have deciphered the silence. The hidden truth is symbolized by “that picture on the wall”—a portrait of a man, likely a family member, “good in uniform.” The phrase “drove him to the shade” implies a tragic end, possibly suicide, linked to military service. This discovery reframes the entire song; the partner’s vile secret and roaring sadness are not a mark of personal darkness, but the inherited, consuming grief of a family tragedy—a pain so monumental it has locked away voices, chased away a father, and now threatens to extinguish the relationship, leaving the narrator to witness the devastating aftermath of a sorrow too long kept behind an oaken door.

Something About You

This Gospel Blues is a hauntingly layered ode to Alabama, a song caught in the powerful tension between deep love for a homeland and the inescapable weight of its brutal history. On the surface, it is a prayerful yearning for return, painted with idealized, sensory-rich images of the South: the gentle yellowhammer’s song, rolling cotton fields, sweet southern maids, and the flowing waters of the Tallapoosa. The repetitive, imploring chorus—“Let’s go down… oh I said Lord”—frames this desire as a spiritual compulsion, a calling to the very roots of a “Southern soul.” It is a nostalgic portrait of belonging, of lying beneath familiar trees and reuniting with a lost love.

Beneath this romantic veneer, however, runs a chilling undercurrent of trauma and violence that the singer cannot—and will not—ignore. The idyllic memory is deliberately ruptured by stark, grievous acknowledgment: “Alabama your past still haunts me, your blood-soaked cotton, rusting chains / Clan still waiting in your shadows.” This transforms the song from a simple homecoming ballad into a profound internal conflict. The beloved landscape is also a burial ground, both for a personal love (“I shall go to where you're laid”) and for a people. The “darker than the darkest” nights speak to this entrenched legacy of racial terror, making the journey back one of pilgrimage and painful witness.

Ultimately, the song resolves not in peace, but in a determined, collective march into this duality. The final verse shifts from “me” to “we,” signaling a movement beyond personal nostalgia into shared purpose. “Alabama, a million strong / we’ll be marching, singing that ol southern song” suggests a new, unified procession—one that carries both the gentle melody of the yellowhammer and the solemn knowledge of the blood-soaked clay. It becomes a gospel of reckoning, where going down to Alabama is an act of love, mourning, and unwavering confrontation with all the shadows that haunt its gentle breeze.

Alabama

This powerful gospel song is a searing indictment of American slavery, framed not as a historical narrative but as a raw, accusatory prayer delivered from the perspective of the enslaved. The verses paint a vivid landscape of suffering: the Mississippi fields that “bled us dry,” the unmarked graves with “no family stone,” and the horrific Middle Passage in “coffin ships.” This imagery grounds the pain in specific, physical brutality—thirst, starvation, whippings, and relentless labor that enriched others while destroying lives. The lyrics confront the economic truth head-on: “we made you rich beyond belief,” stripping away any romanticized veneer from the plantation system.

At the heart of the song is its devastating chorus, which transforms the enslaved into “bleeding lambs,” a potent biblical metaphor of innocent sacrifice. This frames their exploitation as a perverse, unholy sacrament where their only “sin” was their skin color. The repetition of “We fed your hunger and fed your greed” charges the oppressors with a profound moral and spiritual bankruptcy. The song specifically attacks the hypocrisy of Christian enslavers who “prayed for your salvation” while being “Scum whose colour white as snow,” tasked with cracking skin to “save our souls.” This juxtaposition exposes the core blasphemy of using faith to justify atrocity.

The song concludes not with resolution, but with a cyclical return to the opening verse—a structural echo of unending trauma. The final, fragmented line (“burning crosses, and yet again…”) brutally connects the historical oppression of slavery to the enduring terror of the Ku Klux Klan. This link makes the indictment contemporary and complete, stating that the system of racial hatred did not end with emancipation; it merely evolved its symbols. The song thus stands as a lament, a testimony, and an unanswerable charge against a legacy of violence, greed, and theological betrayal that stretches from the coffin ships to the crossroads.

Mississippi Fields

This powerful song chronicles a profound crisis of conscience and agency, framed as a confrontation at a symbolic crossroads. The speaker begins by physically and spiritually assessing the cost of a life of compliance, describing a "servile path" that has "warped my spine, and sowed decay." This tangible imagery grounds the subsequent torrent of self-interrogation, where the speaker questions whether they are merely passive objects—driftwood, a faceless groupie, a coward—or a tragic archetype of betrayal and martyrdom like Judas or Stephen. The central, damning answer to these questions is rhythmically delivered in a recurring chorus: a confession of hollow obedience, "I bend the knee," done for empty rewards like knowledge, gold, and ultimately "fool's gold."

The poem expands its critique from the individual to the collective, questioning if "we" are all demons and rich fools hoarding treasure while losing sight of eternity, highlighting a universal hypocrisy where people "need to practice what they preach." It introduces a mythological reckoning in the form of a boatman who will charge a toll, a fate awaiting all compromised souls—the knaves, crones, and fools. This ominous note underscores that the consequences of passive compliance are inevitable and universal, raising the stakes of the speaker's personal dilemma.

Ultimately, the song does not resolve but achieves a state of urgent, conscious clarity. Returning to the crossroads, the speaker is now "filled with questions" but recognizes the necessity of a clear choice "before I leave and carry on my way." The final, repeated act of bending the knee for "fool's gold" resonates as a conscious, perhaps final, admission of waste. The work ends not with a chosen direction, but with the hardened realization that the path of servitude leads only to decay, and the moment to choose a different road has decisively arrived.

Song for the Yes Man

The song is a raw excavation of public humiliation and private agony, framed by the catastrophic event of being left at the altar. The narrator is trapped in the spotlight of his own devastation, painfully aware of the silent judgment from the congregation and the pitying, watchful eyes of the neighbors. This isn't a private grief; it's a community spectacle, transforming his personal betrayal into a performative martyrdom where he's both the condemned and the unwilling star.

At the heart of his unraveling is the powerful, recurring metaphor of the crucifixion. He doesn't just feel sad; he casts himself as a martyr, climbing his own crucifix and looking for a nail. This imagery elevates his pain from personal heartbreak to a mythic scale of unjust sacrifice. The fantasy culminates in the chilling offer to place the noose around his own neck for his betrayer to "kick the chair," casting her in the role of executioner and finalizing the narrative of his destruction at her hands.

Ultimately, the song traces the spiral from shocked humiliation to a dangerously resigned despair. The bitter reveal that his partner left to run off with his best friend's wife compounds the betrayal, making him a fool in every facet of his life. The repeated, understated chorus—"I don't think I'm suicidal / But I'm just not happy jack"—becomes a hauntingly inadequate description for the psychological freefall happening within. His final plea for the "nails and hammer" is a surrender, a desire to transform overwhelming emotional pain into something physical, definitive, and finally, over.

I don't think I'm Suicidal

This song paints a stark and haunting portrait of a life shaped by an abusive, alcoholic father, whose arrivals are not homecomings but destructive events. Each verse is another iteration of "My old man came home," cataloging a legacy of violence, neglect, and chaos: he curses, empties pockets, beats the mother, smashes a guitar, and even hurls the sleeping dog. The narrator witnesses this all with a chilling, accumulating detachment, seeing the man not as a father but as a force of nature—a "demon possessed" or a "dypso" (drunkard) who merely "drops in to sing," his presence a recurring performance of cruelty and pathetic need.

The central, haunting question of the chorus—"Is he an angel, is he a demon, or something between both of these things?"—captures the core of the narrator's unresolved trauma. It's not a search for goodness, but a struggle to categorize an incomprehensible figure who should have been a protector. This ambiguity is the wound. The turning point arrives with a cold, symbolic justice: "His bed had caught fire, and I didn't care." This indifference marks a profound emotional severance, which is later confirmed when the father returns after "two years in intensive" care only to be met by the silent curiosity of the dog and his final collapse.

The conclusion offers a bleak, quiet resolution. The father's end is noted with stark simplicity: "My old man went out... The service they said was wonderfully warm." There is no mourning, only a detached observation. The final act is a visit to the mother's grave in the "back garden," a private moment of duty or remembrance, before being "returned to the farm"—a phrase suggesting a cyclical return to mundane life. In the instrumental outro, the narrator achieves a hard-won, fragile peace: "I slept pretty well, For the first time in ages." The distant dog bark, once a sign of domestic terror, is now just a sound, signaling that the storm has finally passed and silence, at last, belongs to the survivor.

My Ol' Man

This song presents a sharp contrast between two opposing figures in modern Western culture: the authentic, hardworking cowboy and the superficial, performative "plastic cowboy." The central conflict is established through detailed physical descriptions, where the pristine, artificially clean appearance of the weekend enthusiast—with his spotless hat, pressed jeans, and noisy truck—is immediately juxtaposed against the worn, dusty gear of the genuine vaquero who endures physical pain and harsh weather while performing demanding ranch labor.

The lyrics directly attribute the rise of the "plastic cowboy" to the romanticized mythology of Hollywood, name-checking icons like the Cisco Kid and John Wayne. These weekend posers are depicted as frequenting bars to attract attention, their identity reduced to a costume of country music and affected style, wholly divorced from the actual skills of horsemanship or even competent driving. The chorus serves as a mocking refrain, hammering home their inadequacy and uniformity.

Ultimately, the song is a tribute to the unseen, real cowboy whose life is defined by grit and solitude—driving herds, fixing fences, and battling the elements on a lonely trail. The "plastic cowboy" is condemned as a shallow imitation, a product of consumer culture and film fantasy, while the true vaquero’s identity is earned through relentless, unglamorous work. The fading outro, repeating the taunt about riding and driving, leaves the listener with a lasting impression of the song’s scorn for the inauthentic and its respect for the real.

Plastic Cowboys

This song is a surreal and violent descent into a toxic, co-dependent relationship, framed through gothic and grotesque imagery. The narrator begins with a position of perceived power—"the sun in the darkness"—but quickly reveals a dynamic of mutual destruction, choosing to sleep in a "garden of skulls," a metaphor for the fertile ground of past damages and death upon which this connection thrives. The lyrics paint a world of inherited trauma, referencing a father imprisoned by memory and a lover chasing an impossible affair, establishing a cycle of obsession and insanity that the narrator is now trapped within.

The middle verses descend into a hallucinatory series of clashes and bizarre intimacies. The narrator speaks of fighting "an army of demons" while lying in the lover's pool, suffering a beating from a nurse that turns erotic, and engaging in a mud-covered embrace that is both passionate and violently consumptive—being chewed up and spit out. Each encounter blends pain with perverse tenderness, and authority figures (guards, sentries, a nurse) are either absent or participants in the madness, suggesting this chaotic drama plays out in a space isolated from reality, perhaps a mental institution or a deeply shared psychosis.

The climax reaches its peak of absurdist horror with the lover literally nailing themselves to the ceiling in a grotesque parody of crucifixion, culminating in a spilled "medicinal store"—a failed attempt at control. The song then erupts slowly into madness, abandoning coherent language altogether for frantic, rhythmic nonsense syllables ("dai, de, dai..."). This final breakdown is the ultimate summary: language and narrative structure themselves dissolve, gently echoing away into the silence left after the emotional and psychological explosion. The song doesn't just describe madness; it performs it, leaving the listener in the eerie quiet of its aftermath.

Diary of a Madman

This song is a blistering, darkly comic farewell to a chaotic and manipulative force of nature named Henrietta. The narrator’s tone is one of exhausted finality, laced with bitter humor and vivid insults, as he catalogs her offenses: financial ruin (“burnt up my cards”), deception (“you lied about being from this state”), and nightly escapades with dubious characters. Each verse adds another layer to her portrait of dysfunction—from her theatrical, mascara-streaked pleas and the pathetic prop of stolen grave flowers to the disruptive phone call from her worried boss, revealing the breadth of her fabricated life. The command to “hit the road” is less an outburst of anger than a firm decision, delivered with the weary certainty of someone who has been manipulated one too many times.

Henrietta is painted as a tragic, almost mythic figure of faded allure—a former “princess” now reduced to a “toad.” The narrator acknowledges her raw, magnetic appeal, recalling the power of her “proud solemn breasts” and how she looked “really cute” in cowboy boots on a barstool, admitting she was “never dull.” But this physical allure is precisely the trap; her charm was a surface-level weapon, “only skin deep,” used to disguise a fundamentally “bent” nature that “can never be straight.” Her entire persona is presented as a performance, a “history” from the “school of hard knocks” that proves she was “born to deceive.” The laughter she now provokes is purely derisive, a reaction to the transparent falseness of her “crocodile tears” and kneeling pleas.

Ultimately, the song is about the closing of a door, both literal and symbolic. The narrator has reached a point of unshakeable resolve, seeing Henrietta’s pattern as unchangeable—“not in a billion light years.” The detailed packing list in the opening lines frames her departure as a permanent eviction. The final image is one of definitive separation: she can “load up that car, and then hit the road hard,” but his door “will be closed” when she leaves. There’s a note of cynical pity in the last lines—a recognition that her destructive nature is a inherent tragedy (“too bad that you had been born to deceive”)—but not enough to crack his hardened resolve. The repeated, driving chorus is his mantra of liberation, as he finally severs himself from her delicious, toxic chaos.

Hit the Road Henrietta

Collection of songwriters under the leadership of Bill Kinlough

Mississippi Fields

The Great Unwashed

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