| A baby with a baby just barely seventeen
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| My mother mourned her innocence
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| While she bounced me on her knee
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| A daddy on the road added to her tears and trials
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| Like silver rain they fell upon this melancholy child
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| The sounds of my childhood still linger in my song
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| My mother’s lullaby that train that ran behind our home
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| A whippoorwill on a window sill — It should have made me smile
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| But everything sounds lonesome to a melancholy child
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| Now a restless blood runs in our family
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| I thought I could out run the emptiness inside of me So I went a little crazy, went a little wild
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| Trying to outdistance my own melancholy child
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| I met a kind and gentleman who thinks the world of me And when he looks my way it is a woman that he sees
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| But when I can’t explain to him the tears that fill my eyes
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| He takes me in his arms and rocks his melancholy child
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| You take a black Irish temper and some solemn Cherokee
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| A Southern sense of humour and you got someone like me There are thorns on every rose to this I’m reconciled
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| They’re just a little sharper to a melancholy child
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| And in my own babe’s eyes I see the signs of melancholy child
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| Heaven help us all, another melancholy child |