Ride this train to any county
fair in this land.
Now here's a hard -working,
happy people.
Miss Jones baked the finest pie
for the contest this year,
and Mr. Brown's got the biggest,
fattest old sow you ever saw.
And all the kids are eating popcorn
and cotton candy.
This is Chester, South Carolina
and that year at the fair
my papa brought us all down
in a wagon
and on the way down
we picked up another family
that lived up the creek.
I was just a little boy
but I remember I kept asking Papa,
how much father is it?
How much father is it?
We had a young heifer tied
to the wagon
that Papa just knew
was gonna take first prize.
I didn't have no doubt
about that heifer winning first prize
but the main thing I was inter
ested in
was something else
Papa had under his seat
at the front of the wagon.
And that was an old dobro
that I thought Papa played
like nobody else in the world.
I guess by real musical standards
Papa didn't know too much about music,
but I'll tell you, that night at the fair,
when he played in the dance band,
I just had to stay awake and sit up
there and listen to
Papa play the dobro.
My papa was a hobo
when they delivered me
We didn't have a doctor
cause he couldn't pay the fee
But when the gore got too bad
to ease his misery
Papa played the dobro this
way
When company would come around,
he kept the dobro here
He knew he couldn't play
the way the other players did
Well, the guitar's resonator
was a gallon bucket lid
But Papa played the dobro this way,
and he'd go team, team, team
Well now that Papa's gone away,
it's hangin' by the flu
The top of it's busted,
and the strings are rusted too
It won't ever sound the way that
it did when it was new
When Papa played the dobro this way