Paradise
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When I was a child my family would travel,
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down to western Kentucky where my parents were born.
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There's a backwards old town that's often remembered,
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so many times that my memories are worn.
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And Daddy won't you take me back to Mulemberg County.
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Down by the Green River where paradise lay.
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I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in askin'
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Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.
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Well sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River
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to an abandoned old prison down by Ebrie Hill.
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Where the air smelled like snakes we'd shoot with our pistols,
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but empty pop bottles was all we would kill.
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Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel,
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and they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.
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Well they dug for their coal 'till the land was forsaken,
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then wrote it all down as the progress of man.
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When I die let my ashes flow down the Green River.
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Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam.
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I'll be halfway to heaven with paradise waitin'
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just five miles away from wherever I am.