"Paradise"
#601 / Flood Time Capsule: 1974
Fifty-two years ago tonight, Dave Peyton and Charlie Bowen publicly performed their first John Prine song together, perhaps the best known Prine song of all times: “Paradise.” (Daddy, won’tcha take me back to Muhlenberg County / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?)
Many “firsts” were occurring in those antediluvian days. Having at that point played together less than five months, Peyton and Bowen a week or so earlier had played their first public show togher and next week would play their first out-of-town gig. This also was the first time Dave and Charlie sang and played together at the Bowen Bash, the semiannual music party at which The Flood was born.
John Prine’s music was early feature of the bashes. In fact, at the very first bash, an old friend — the late singer-guitarist Terry Goller — came toting a selection of interesting new folk albums to share, including Prine’s self-titled first album, released less than a year earlier.
The May 18, 1974, gathering also was the first bash to be recorded. With Stewart Schneider at the helm of the taping equipment, here, in the video below, is the audio of Bowen and Peyton’s treatment of “Paradise” that night:
About the Song
John Prine rather famously told an interviewer that he wrote “Paradise” for his father “mainly so he would know I was a songwriter.”
Speaking with American Songwriter Magazine’s Jim Beviglia, Prine noted, “Paradise was a real place in Kentucky, and while I was in the army in Germany, my father sent me a newspaper article telling me how the coal company had bought the place out.”
Calling it “a real Disney-looking town,” Prine added, “it sat on the river, had to general stores, and there was one black man in town, Bubby Short. He looked like Uncle Remus and hung out with my Granddaddy Ham, my mom’s dad, all day fishing for catfish. Then the bulldozers came in and wiped it all off the map.”
In 1971, when John recorded the song on his first album, he brought a tape of the record home to his dad.
“I had to borrow a reel-to-reel machine to play it for him,” Prine said. ‘When the song came on, he went into the next room and sat in the dark while it was on. I asked him why, and he said he wanted to pretend it was on the jukebox.”
Peabody Pissed Off
While millions love “Paradise,” Peabody Coal Co., not surprisingly, isn’t among them. Soon after the song’s appearance, the mining company released a response called “Facts vs. Prine,” stating, “We probably helped supply the energy to make that recording that falsely names us as ‘hauling away’ Paradise, Kentucky.”
In 2015, the company even unsuccessfully tried to have the song’s lyrics struck from a Wyoming lawsuit brought by protestors who said they were arrested for holding banners near the company’s shareholders’ meeting.
“As the lyrics have existed since 1971,” ruled U.S. Magistrate Kelly Rankin in the Cheyenne case, “it is difficult to see how the inclusion … prejudices defendant Peabody in any way. … (The lyrics) do not degrade Peabody’s moral character, contain repulsive language or disrespect the dignity of the court.”
An Ivydale Memory
While we were all grateful to Terry Goller for including the John Prine debut among the albums he brought to that first Bowen Bash back in 1972, that wasn’t first time some of us heard “Paradise.”
Eight months earlier, on the stage of the Morris Family Old Time Music Festival in Ivydale, WV, David Morris announced he had just learned a new song and then with his brother John began began singing, “When I was child, my family would travel / Down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born….” Standing near that darkened stage, Charlie and Pamela were immediately transfixed.
Ivydale, tucked in Clay County on the banks of the Elk River, was a rustic setting for a festival. “Wood-seated outhouses and one water spigot to serve 5,000 music fanatica,” as Floodster Emeritus Stew Schneider wrote to friends in a review soon after. “It was definitely not for the faint of heart.”
Stew wasn’t the only future Floodster on hand for the Ivydale weekend. Jack Nuckols had married his life-long sweetheart Susie Holbrook in early 1971. Pamela and Charlie, still newlyweds themselves, were eager to spend more time with the couple, so when the Nuckols invited them to come along on a trek, they said yes.
Ivydale also would bring together musicians who would become critical to The Flood’s birth. The music that the Bowens heard there inspired the weekend “Bowen Bash” parties that would begins the next year and continue for nearly a decade at Charlie and Pamela’s house.
Camping out and picking within feet of the Nuckols/Bowens site all weekend were Jim and Ralf Strother, Susan and Stew Schneider and H. David Holbrook. (If Ivydale has a soundtrack in the Bowens’ memories, it is that earliest configuration of The Kentucky Foothill Ramblers — David, Jack and Jim — playing Uncle Dave Macon’s “Sail Away Ladies” until the Clay County hills rang long into the autumn night.
But another part of that soundtrack would be hearing the incomparable David Morris singing “Paradise.”
Daddy, won’tcha take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.
More Prine Music?
Meanwhile, want to hear more Flood renditions of John Prine songs? Gotcha covered. Not long ago, we released a special John Prine Memorial Show. Click the image below to check it out.