• RBWells@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Red Dirt Girl, Emmylou Harris

    “He told her - little sister, gonna ride the wind, up around the moon and back again. Well, he never got farther than Vietnam, I was standing there with her when the telegram come for Lillian.”

    And “nobody tells you 'bout the blues when you got 'em, you just keep falling cause there ain’t no bottom, there ain’t no end, least not for Lillian.”

    AND

    “Nobody knows when she started her skid, she was only 27 and she had 5 kids. Might have been the whiskey, might have been the pills, might have been the dream she was trying to kill.”

    Such a tearjerker, a very cathartic song when you need to cry. Boulder to Birmingham too.

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      Don’t forget Angel From Montgomery. John Prine sure didn’t sound like Emmylou, but he somehow wrote just as poignant a song about being a woman, even if its tragedy was smaller.

      • RBWells@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yeah I have a “sad” list for when I need to cry. These and Sweet Old World by Lucinda Williams and Road by Nick Drake, because he didn’t find a road to take him home, and the stories about how he was so depressed he’d go into the studio and lay flat on the floor to record the songs.

        John Prine also has that Sam Stone song, that is less poignant and more aggressively sad but so real sounding too.