Jenrose and the Kentucky Bootleggers: Music

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I wrote this farm for Steve Smith, a former tobacco farmer and friend of mine. I asked him what a song about his life farming might sound like, and he said: "I guess it would be like John Prine's 'Paradise,' but instead of Mr. Peobody's coal train that hauled the region away, it would be Phillip Morris and R.J. Reynolds."

If you stop at the Citgo just off the interstate
You can pick up a pack of those Kentucky’s Best
Give me the finest of burley tobacco
And you can take back the rest

Go left at the bottom, just past the Pentecost
Singin that old-time refrain
You can follow the billows of smoke from the chimney
A hundred years back at the end of the lane

(Singin) Where there’s smoke, there’s sure to be a fire…

Raised with tobacco in old Trimble County
It was down by the Little Kentucky we’d play
The work was hard then, but we weren’t scared of working
And we knew who we were at the end of the day

And life’s contradictions and old-time religions
Were just lessons I learned as a child
Where they’d shame you for smoking in the sermons on Sunday
In a church that was raised on tobacco’s own tithe

(Singin) Where there’s smoke, there’s sure to be fire…

My grandfather lived through the Hoover Depression
Said he hoped he’d live to see change
But come Reagan’s new morning, 1984
He knew he’d seen the last of his days

They said Times are changing and I tried to change with them
I took their advice, and I near lost my land
And I’ve seen my share now of snake oil and hucksters
No mud on their boots, just blood on their hands…

…There’s sure to be a fire…

So go left at the bottom, just past the Pentecost
Singin that old-time refrain:
(Singin) Won’t you take me to old Trimble County
By the Little Kentucky where paradise lay?

Won’t you take me to old Trimble County
By the Little Kentucky where paradise lay…