[Intro | Harmonica, flatpicked acoustic, room sound] [Verse 1 | 1B, plain narrative delivery] She was born in nineteen hundred where the Smokies hold the rain In Sevier County, Tennessee, in the sawdust and the grain Her daddy followed timber till the timber all was gone Then the mill towns down in Carolina whistled them along She took the oldest tunes she knew and gave them words to say And she called it a song ballet [Verse 2] She worked the spinning frames at night to see her babies through the day Nine she bore and four she buried in the Carolina clay Whooping cough and hunger, and a wage that couldn't feed 'em She wrote it down in rhyme, 'cause a rhyme is how you keep 'em She sang it from a flatbed so the whole mill heard her pray And she called it a song ballet [Verse 3] She lived out there in Stumptown with the Black mill hands next door And she asked the union plainly who it thought the union's for She sang of one line, one wage, one shift, one fight, one long gray day And she called it a song ballet [Harmonica break] [Verse 4] On the fourteenth of September, nineteen twenty-nine She rode the bed of a pickup truck toward a meeting down the line She wasn't thirty yet, and they stopped the truck along the way And they shot her in the daylight — But they couldn't shoot a song ballet [Verse 5] Five men stood before a jury, fifty saw it plain as day And in less than half an hour, the five went home to stay They buried her in Bessemer, her children sent away But they couldn't shoot a song ballet [Final Verse | slower, harmonica under voice] Now a song's a thing you carry, and a song will carry you back Through the mill and through the mountain and the cinders on the track So if you borrow someone's melody, remember who you pay Sing her one more Tennessee ballet (one more Tennessee ballet) [Outro | Harmonica alone]
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