Sharon, I have always taken the first verse to say that the revenue man never came back from Copperhead Road, the second to be about an ambush of his daddys weekly run and the third verse to be a return to his grandaddy's defiance.

Incidentally I play this on a standard tuned guitar, but with capo on the first five strings, second fret. This is a bit like playing in dropped D and gives a great drone on the open E string. It also means that when you play your G shape you play it as normal, unlike when you actually drop the string down to D. This is how SE played it when I saw him at Brampton festival a couple of years back.