Woodrow - Tom Russell

Aw, Mrs. Guthrie look what they done to your brown-eyed baby now

Oh, the trains leave every morning, some go east and some go west

And the clacking of the iron is the sound you love the best

It’s the great escape from railroad bulls and the Coney Island girls

Aw, Mrs. Guthrie, look what we done to your brown eyed boy with curls

Sing the truth, scream it loud

Aw, Mrs. Guthrie, look what they done to your brown-eyed baby now

All those boxcars full of Chinese junk, the caboose has been junk piled

And we’re all buying groceries now from men with crooked smiles

You were a drunken, wild misogyneer and your politics were crude

As you sat home writing nursery rhymes and drawing women nude

And all those politicians breaths stink bad, be they left or be they right

And the ones who play with rhetoric are not the ones to fight

Don’t go coming 'round here, Woodrow, they’ll stretch you from a rope

And your corpse won’t ever find a bar where a man can drink and smoke

Repeat Sing the truth, scream it loud

Aw, Mrs. Guthrie, look what they done to your brown-eyed baby now

Instrumental ()

Did you hear the screen door slam, Ma, Woodrow’s gone again

He’s writin' obscene letters now, the Feds might bring him in

But every song he ever wrote is hangin' on the breeze

With the laundry in the Guthrie yard full of Huntington’s disease

So, Woodrow, rest in peace, old pal, there ain’t nothin' for you here

We’re in the scrub oak country now, the land of dread an' fear

And whitey’s in the wood pile and the writing’s on the wall

But your ring of truth still echoes down the Greystone clinic hall

Repeat Sing the truth, scream it loud

Aw, Mrs. Guthrie, look what they done to your brown-eyed baby now

So here’s to all outsiders, all the ones who could not fit

The troubadour, the prisoners, the drunken Indian

Ah, the circus freaks, the wounded lovers will make it through somehow

Ah, Mrs. Guthrie, we are ridin' blind with your brown eyed baby now

Sing the truth scream it loud

Ah, Mrs. Guthrie, look what we done to your brown-eyed baby now

Sing the truth, scream it loud

Ah, Mrs. Guthrie, look what we done to your brown-eyed baby now