Piketown Blues

I'm gettin' outta Piketown I'm tellin' you Baby I'm gettin' outta Piketown And it's gettin' outta me Back when Johnny showed up In Eighteen Thirty-Five The creek was full of fishes That fed the local tribe This will be a fine place For us to settle down Johnny told his people And they called the place Piketown Seventy years later Turn of the century Johnny's great great grandson Opened up a factory That produced automobiles Or what passed for them then By the time the wars were over It employed ten thousand men I offer you this background So that we can set the stage In the Midwest rust belt city Where I was born and raised But I'm gettin' outta Piketown That you can believe Yeah I'm gettin' outta Piketown And it's gettin' outta me At the end of the Eighties They closed the factory And everyone was wonderin' What'd become of our city Many of my friends' dads Lost their jobs and moved away And many more that stayed behind Hit the taverns every day It was about this time I was in my senior year My crew also took to drinkin' Because that’s what you did here We went out by the train tracks Under the highway In an old conversion van We put our booze away I'd been shootin' Smirnoff When I stumbled to the barn Even in my condition What I saw raised my alarm She had been my girlfriend Still was some of the time He was like a brother And he should've known my mind That I would try to kill him For seein' what I saw He left in an ambulance I was hauled off by the Law I got outta Piketown Prison Fifteen years plus time served Can't say I regret it Bastard got what he deserved Lookin' 'round the city now Hard to reckon what I see Condos on the Riverfront Old plant's a microbrewery So I'm gettin' outta Piketown Now that I got a reprieve Finally gettin' outta Piketown Before Piketown kills me April 30, 2017