Back in nineteen twenty-seven,
I had a little farm and I called that heaven.
Well, the prices up and the rain come down,
and I hauled my crops all into town.
I got the money, bought clothes and groceries,
fed the kids, and raised a family.
Rain quit and the wind got high,
and the black ol' dust storm filled the sky.
And I swapped my farm for a Ford machine,
and I poured it full of this gas-i-line.
And I started, rockin' an' a-rollin',
over the mountains, out towards the old Peach Bowl.
Way up yonder on a mountain road,
I had a hot motor and a heavy load,
I's a-goin' pretty fast, there wasn't even stoppin',
a-bouncin' up and down, like popcorn poppin'.
Had a breakdown, sort of a nervous bustdown of some kind,
there was a feller there, a mechanic feller, said it was en-gine trouble.
Way up yonder on a mountain curve,
it's way up yonder in the piney wood,
an' I give that rollin' Ford a shove,
an' I's a-gonna coast as far as I could.
Commence coastin', pickin' up speed,
was a hairpin turn, I didn't make it.
Man alive, I'm a-tellin' you,
the fiddles and the guitars really flew.
That Ford took off like a flying squirrel
an' it flew halfway around the world,
scattered wives and childrens
all over the side of that mountain.
We got out to the West Coast broke,
so dad-gum hungry I thought I'd croak,
an' I bummed up a spud or two,
an' my wife fixed up a tater stew.
We poured the kids full of it, mighty thin stew, though,
you could read a magazine right through it.
Always have figured that if it'd been just a little bit thinner,
some of these here politicians coulda seen through it.