Lyrics

DARK AIR

I never lived in Appalachia
Just a traveler through some mountain lands
Where sudden deer appear in night fog
Like holy apparitions

And once I married a young handsome biker
Whose foot tangled at birth
In gloomy myth in gloomy myth

His father was a coal miner down in Tennessee
Where he met and married Esther a Cherokee
He pulled up out of that mining hole and brought his family
To the corn fields of Ohio and the smoke stacks of the foundries

Well Jessie was a tidy man
He grew smaller day by day
Till his lungs were snuffed like carbide lamps
The mine took him away

Way down deep in the underground
Breathing black dust to the pick axe sound
Way down deep in the underground

Repeat verse

Two elder sons gone long before him
Not to the dust of mines but worse
One from hard work the other from hard liquor
And the arrows of an Indian curse

Separately like highway deer
They flew out into the dark air
Night driving my handsome biker drunk

Repeat verse

Well I was cursed said Esther
For leaving the reservation
The reservation and the coal mine stalked her
And took her men

Repeat first verse