His Daddy was a simple man, just a red dirt Georgia farmer

And his Momma spent her young life havin’ kids and balin’ hay

He had fifteen years and an ache inside to wander

So he hopped a freight in Waycross and wound up in L.A.



Lord, the cold nights had no pity on a Waycross, Georgia farm boy

Most days he went hungry, then the summer came

He met a girl known on the strip as San Francisco’s Mabel Joy

Destitutions child born of an L.A. street called “Shame”



Growin’ up came quietly in the arms of Mabel Joy

Laughter found their mornings brought meaning to his life

Yes, the night before she left sleep came and left that Waycross, Georgia boy

With dreams of Georgia cotton and a California wife



Sunday morning found him standin’ neath the red light at her door

When a right cross sent him reelin’, put him face down on the floor

In place of Mabel Joy he found a merchant mad marine

Who growled, “Your Georgia neck is red but sonny, you’re still green”



He turned twenty-one in a gray rock fed’ral prison

The old judge had no mercy for a Waycross, Georgia boy

Starin’ at those four gray walls in silence he would listen

To that midnight freight he knew would take him back to Mabel Joy



Sunday mornin’ found him standin’ ’neath the red light at her door

With a bullet in his side, he cried, “Have you seen Mabel Joy?”

Stunned and shaken someone said, “Why, she’s not here no more

She left this house four years today, they say she’s lookin’ for some Gergia farm boy”