| Back in nineteen twenty seven
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| I had a little farm, I called that Heaven
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| The prices up and the rain come down
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| And I hauled my crops all into town
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| I got the money
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| Bought clothes and groceries
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| Fed the kids and raised a big family
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| But the rain quit and the wind got high
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| A black old dust storm filled the sky
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| I traded my farm for a Ford machine
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| Poured it full of this gasoline
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| Started rocking and rolling
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| Deserts and mountains to California
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| Way up yonder on a mountain road
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| Hot motor and a heavy load
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| Going pretty fast I wasn’t even stopping
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| Bouncing up and down like popcorn popping
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| I had a breakdown —
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| Kind of a nervous bustdown
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| The mechanic fellow there charged me five bucks
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| Said it was engine trouble
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| Way up yonder on a mountain curve
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| Way up yonder in the piney wood
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| I gave that rolling Ford a shove
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| And I coast as far as I could
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| Commencing rolling
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| Picking up speed
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| Come a hairpin turn and…
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| I didn’t make it
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| No man alive I’m telling you
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| That the fiddles and the guitars really flew
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| That Ford took off like a flying squirrel
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| And it flew halfway around the world
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| Scattered the wives and children
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| All over the side of that mountain
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| Got to California so dad gum broke
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| Dad gum hungry that I thought I’d choke
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| I bummed up a spud or two
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| And a wife fixed up some 'tater stew
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| We poured the kids full of it
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| Mighty skinny kids
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| Looked like a tribe of thermometers running around
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| No man I swear to you
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| That was surely mighty thin stew
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| So damn thin I really mean
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| You could read a magazine right through it
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| Look at the pictures, too
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| Pretty whisky bottles and naked women
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| Always have thought and always have figured
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| That if that damn stew had been just a little bit thinner
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| Some of these here politicians could have seen through it |