It’s two years today since my mother ‘went ahead’. This song by Iris Luella DeMent (a friend of Merle Haggard's; a huge talent and a Pentecostal-raised girl from Arkansas) has been a big favourite of mine for many years, and even so now. It’s almost autobiographical for me in so many ways. (She also recorded the old hymn Higher Ground as a duet with her mother, but it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube - seek it out, it’s magnificent).
She grew up plain and simple in a farming town
Her daddy played the fiddle and use to do the calling
when they had hoedowns
She said the neighbours would come
and they'd move all my grandma's furniture round
And there'd be twenty or more there on the old wooden floor
dancing to a country sound
The Carters and Jimmie Rodgers played her favorite songs
And on Saturday nights there was a radio show
and she would sing along
And I'll never forget her face when she revealed to me
That she'd dreamed about singing at The Grand Ol' Opry
Her eyes, oh how they sparkled when she sang those songs
While she was hanging the clothes on the line
I was a kid just a humming along
Well, I'd be playing in the grass,
to her what might of seemed obliviously
But there ain't no doubt about it, she sure made her mark on me
She played old gospel records on the phonograph
She turned them up loud and we'd sing along
but those days have passed
Just now that I am older it occurs to me
That I was singing in the grandest opry
And we sang Sweet Rose of Sharon, Abide With Me
Til I ride The Gospel Ship to Heaven's Jubilee
And In That Great Triumphant Morning my soul will be free
And My Burdens Will Be Lifted when my Saviour's face I see
So I Don't Want to Get Adjusted to this world below
But I know He'll Pilot Me when it comes time to go
Oh, nothing on this earth is half as dear to me
As the sound of my Mama's Opry
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