Where The Devil Dont Stay A Ghost To Most Drive By Truckers

Where The Devil Don't Stay Album: The Dirty South (2008)
A Ghost To Most Album: Brighter Than Creation's Dark (2008)
by Drive By Truckers

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes.

Where the Devil Don't Stay tells the band's unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers' albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band's members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author's hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers' complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don't Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it's a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

Where the Devil Don't Stay
Drive-By Truckers
Written by: John Cooley

My daddy played poker in the woods, they say
Back in his younger days
Prohibition was the talk, but the rich folks walked
To the woods where my daddy stayed

Jugs and jars from shiners
These old boys here, they ain't miners
They came from The Twenty Niners
It didn't take a hole in the ground to put the bottom in their face

Back in the 30's when the dust bowl dried
And the woods of Alabama didn't see no light
My daddy played poker by a hard wood fire
Squeezing all his luck from a hot copper wire

Scrap like a wildcat fights 'til the end
Trap a wildcat and take his skin
Deal from the bottom, put the ace in the hole
One hand on the jug, but you never do know

Son come running
You better come quick
This rotgut moonshine is making me sick
Your mama called the law
And they're gonna take me away
Down so far even the devil won't stay

Where I call to the Lord with all my soul
I can hear him rattling the chains on the door
He couldn't get in, I could see he tried
Through the shadows of the cage around the 40 watt light

Daddy, tell me another story
Tell me 'bout the lows and the highs
Tell me how to tell the difference 'tween
What they tell me is the truth or a lie

Tell me why the ones who have so much
Make the ones who don't go mad?
With the same skin stretched over their white bones
And the same jug in their hand

My daddy played poker on a stump in the woods
Back when the world was gray
Before black and white went and chose upsides
And gave a little bit of both their way

The only blood that's any cleaner
Is the blood that's blue or greener
Without either you just get meaner
And the blood you gave, gives you away

Son, come running
You better come quick
This rotgut moonshine is making me sick
Your mama called the law
And they're gonna take me away
Down so far even the devil won't stay

Where I call to the Lord with all my soul
I can hear him rattling the chains on the door
He couldn't get in, I could see he tried
Through the shadows of the cage around the 40 watt light

A Ghost to Most
Drive-By Truckers
Written by: John Cooley

I guess I'll never grow a sideburn
It's a shame with all I've got to go between
I hope somebody's cause takes soon
It's getting hard to find a place a root can sink
Mama said a lot of things
And "Be thankful" was the one she never minded saying twice
Thanks to her I can think clear enough
To be thankful that she died before tonight

Baby, every bone in my body's gone to jumping
Like they're gonna come through my skin
If they could get along without the rest of me
It wouldn't matter if they did
But skeletons ain't got nowhere to stick their money
Nobody makes britches that size
And besides, you're a ghost to most
Before they notice that you ever had a hair or a hide

Saving everybody takes a man on a mission
With a swagger that can set the world at ease
Some believe it's God's own hand on the trigger
And the other dumping water in the streets
Talking tough's easy when it's other people's evil
And you're judging what they do and don't believe
It seems to me you'd have to have a hole in your own
To point a finger at somebody else's sheet

Baby, every bone in my body's gone to jumping
Like they're gonna come through my skin
If they could get along without the rest of me
It wouldn't matter if they did
Skeletons ain't got nowhere to stick their money
Nobody makes britches that size
And besides, you're a ghost to most
Before they notice that you ever had a hair or a hide

I don't know how much good it does a man
To keep on telling him how good it is he's free
Free to wash his ghost down the drain
And free for them to tell him there's no such a thing

Baby, every bone in my body's gone to jumping
Like they're gonna come through my skin
If they could get along without the rest of me
It wouldn't matter if they did
Skeletons ain't got nowhere to stick their money
Nobody makes britches that size
And besides you're a ghost to most
Before they notice that you ever had a hair or a hide