PARADISE

      Words & Music 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 backwards old town that's often remembered
So my times that my memories are worn

   And daddy, won't you take me 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
   Mister Peabody's coal tran just hauled it away
 
Well sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
To the abandoned old prison down by Adrie Hill
Where the air smelled like snakes
  and we'd shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill

   And daddy, won't you take me 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
   Mister Peabody's coal tran just hauled it away
 
And 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 'til the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man

   And daddy, won't you take me 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
   Mister Peabody's coal tran just hauled it away
 
   And daddy, won't you take me 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
   Mister Peabody's coal tran just hauled it away


Copyright 1971 by Cotillion Music, Inc.
From the John Denver album  "Rocky Mountain High"