Our Town By Iris DeMent with Emmylou Harris
And you know the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.Up the street beside that red neon light,
That’s where I met my baby on one hot summer night.
He was the tender and I ordered a beer,
It’s been forty years and I’m still sitting here.But you know the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.It’s here I had my babies and I had my first kiss.
I’ve walked down Main Street in the cold morning mist.
Over there is where I bought my first car.
It turned over once but then it never went far.And I can see the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.I buried my Mama and I buried my Pa.
They sleep up the street beside that pretty brick wall.
I bring them flowers about every day,
but I just gotta cry when I think what they’d say.If they could see how the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.Now I sit on the porch and watch the lightning-bugs fly.
But I can’t see too good, I got tears in my eyes.
I’m leaving tomorrow but I don’t wanna go.
I love you, my town, you’ll always live in my soul.But I can see the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on, I gotta kiss you goodbye,
But I’ll hold to my lover,
‘Cause my heart’s ’bout to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to my town, to my town.
I can see the sun has gone down on my town, on my town,
Goodnight.
Goodnight.
As a Wall Street Equity Anaylst, I covered the Food & Drug Retailers (Wal-Mart, Kroger, Albertson’s, Safeway, SuperValu, Ahold/Stop n Shop, and Delhaize/Food Lion among others). To do my job well meant going out and visiting stores across the country. I have been to more Wal-Marts than I care to count, certainly in the hundreds. Not a complaint really, I loved going across this great land and meeting people and talking to them about their supermarkets. In Richmond, they love their Ukrop’s, in Charlotte, they love Harris-Teeter and in Florida they just adore Publix. In Iowa, it’s Hy-vee or up in Seattle they rave about Larry’s but down in San Antonio it’s HEB or Central Market. But this is a story about one small town whose name I can’t even remember. Lost and forgotten in southeastern Kansas (Cherokee County) near the Missouri and Oklahoma border.
I stumbled upon this town by accident after visiting a series of stores in Springfield, Missouri and heading down to visit more stores in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was a warm Sunday in early May with Spring in the air, the grass green and the trees budding. Life was in the throes of its annual renewal, or so I thought. I pulled off the Interstate to explore and find some lunch. Not much there except the occasional farm but there was the promise of a meal so the sign said some five miles off the beaten path. And so I drove on. Then came the posters of a classic car fair. Cool, lunch and a show.
There was no town there. Main Street was boarded up. Not a single store open for business. No hardware store, no market, no bait & tackle shop, no coffee shop. All gone except for a Dairy Queen on the outskirts of town. The nearest Wal-Mart twenty-five miles away had put a whole town out of business. There were still people living in and around on the outskirts. I am sure many earned a living farming but without a commercial sector what hope was there for this town?
If not for the classic car fair that day, there would not been a soul on Main Street that day. If not for the classic car fair that day, I would have dined at the Dairy Queen. I walked through the town and met people from far and wide who had brought their rather expensive jalopies to this classic car fair. I met a few locals. Nice people still stuck there for this was their home, where they were born, where they had their first kiss, had their kids, buried their parents. They had a life and perhaps a future of their choosing limited as that might be but America has let them down. They wouldn’t quite put it that way. They are proud people. They helped to build this country. And we’ve let them down. I am saying that we have let them down.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town.
Obama can’t relate to this. It’s beyond him. He has no conception of what life is like for real hard-working Americans. To him, they’re bitter and clinging to guns and religion. They are neither bitter nor clinging to anything but values of decency and hard work. And it is because I have been to a small lost and forgotten town in southeastern Kansas that I can say with pride that I am Clinton Democrat and nothing else. When I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I think back to that day and I realize she gets it. She understands what needs to be done. And while John McCain may not get what needs to be done to fully revitalize small town America, he doesn’t talk down to them either and he certainly doesn’t go around behind close doors here in San Francisco telling billionaires that half of America is just downright bitter. What will cost Obama this election is that he just doesn’t get the angst in small town America where the sun is setting fast.