Hi, Wolf and Dicho:

Just a couple of small changes, Wolfgang:

Ships on the prairie that never sailed the sea
Carrying all that they owned
and the last line of the first verse:
It's as good a place as any for a town

Good job, Wolfgang. Like a lot of songs I've written, these came from a dream. The night before this song came to me, I was reading Giants In The Earth by Rolvaag for the third time. The opening scenes of the book are so powerful that I fell asleep with those images in my mind. Just before I work up, I saw the image of stopping along a river bank on the prairie, and deciding to bed the cattle settled down for the night. I awoke with the first two lines running through my mind. Some of the lines in this song are from family and friends... the line about still being able to smell the prairie came from an elderly gentlemen I met many years after I left the Midwest. The last verse comes from everywhere. I remember sitting on the front steps of the Cozart Hotel in Clinton, Missouri talking to an old black man who'd carried my bags up stairs... the one night of a six week I slept in a room and not in my car. The old man talked with heavy heart about how all of his kids had to leave the town because the strip mines had played out, and there was no work for them.

You're right, Wolfgang and Dicho... old men, the world around, sit at a bar, play cards, go fishing or just sit on a stoop, mourning the loss of what they valued when they were young.

Thanks for posting this. Skip Gorman does thia, mixed in with his more traditional cowboy songs, and played fiddle on this song on one of my albums.

Jerry^^