Guy refers to this song as one of his "wrist splitters". I still can't even read through it without a tear. The Randall Knife by Guy Clark My father had a Randall knife My mother gave it to him When he went off to WWII To save us all from ruin If you've ever held a Randall knife Then you know my father well If a better blade was ever made It was probably forged in hell My father was a good man A lawyer by his trade And only once did I ever see Him misuse the blade It almost cut his thumb off When he took it for a tool The knife was made for darker things And you could not bend the rules He let me take it camping once On a Boy Scout jamboree And I broke a half an inch off Trying to stick it in a tree I hid it from him for a while But the knife and he were one He put it in his bottom drawer Without a hard word one There it slept and there it stayed For twenty some odd years Sort of like Excalibur Except waiting for a tear My father died when I was forty And I couldn't find a way to cry Not because I didn't love him Not because he didn't try I'd cried for every lesser thing Whiskey, pain and beauty But he deserved a better tear And I was not quite ready So we took his ashed out to sea And poured `em off the stern And threw the roses in the wake Of everything we'd learned When we got back to the house They asked me what I wanted Not the lawbooks not the watch I need the things he's haunted My hand burned for the Randall knife There in the bottom drawer And I found a tear for my father's life And all that it stood for And here is Si Kahn. A master of simplicity. Gone, Gonna Rise Again (Si Kahn) I remember the year that my granddaddy died Gone, gonna rise again They dug his grave on the mountainside Gone, gonna rise again I was too young to understand The way he felt about the land But I could read his history in his hand Gone, gonna rise again It's corn in the crib and apples in the bin Ham in the smokehouse and cotton in the gin Cows in the barn and hogs in the lot You know, he never had a lot But he worked like a devil for the living he got These apple trees on the mountainside He planted the seeds just before he died I guess he knew that he'd never see The red fruit hanging from the tree But he planted the seeds for his children and me High on the ridge above the farm I think of my people that have gone on Like a tree that grows in the mountain ground The storms of life have cut them down But the new wood springs from roots in the ground Big RiB
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