Johnny Cash Album: Ride This Train Track: Old Doc Brown
Old Doc Brown Lyrics
Ride this train let me show you a land of rolling hills and tall corn A land of hard working people where rewards are often very small This is Pella Iowa My mother and father brought me here in 1847 we came from Cork Ireland We had a potato famine over there and things had been pretty rough for us I remember during the potato famine in Ireland I'd trail along at father's feet And we'd try to find enough potatoes for a meal And we'd take em back in to mother and she'd cook em coats and all Well finally we gave up and somehow we made it to America Well our new neighbors here in Pella loaned father oxen And ploughs to make his first crop with And you never saw taller corn that year than it was on our place The next season why we were even lendin' out ploughs and oxen to other farms That's the way it was here in the new land Everybody helped everybody out if you got sick everybody came to visit Even the doctor wouldn't take pay if he thought you couldn't afford it But old Doc Brown was always there if you ever needed him
He was just an old country doctor in a little country town Fame and fortune had passed him by though we never saw him frown As day by day in his kindly way he'd serve us one and all Many a patient forgot to pay although Doc's fees were small Though he needed his dimes and there were times that he'd receive a fee He'd pass it onto some poor soul that needed it worse than he He had to sell his furniture couldn't pay his office rent So to a dusty room over a livery stable Doc Brown and his satchel went And on the hitchin' post at the kerb below to advertise his wares He nailed a little sign that read Doc Brown has moved upstairs And one day he didn't answer when they knocked upon his door Old Doc Brown was layin' down but his soul was no more They found him there in that old black suit on his face was a smile of content But all the money they could find on him was a quarter and a copper cent So they opened up his ledger and what they saw gave their hearts a pull Beside each debtor's name old Doc had write these words Paid In Full Old Doc should had a funeral fine enough for a king It's a ghastly joke our town was broke and no one could give a thing Cept Jones an undertaker he did mighty well Donated an old iron casket he had never been able to sell And the funeral procession it wasn't much for grace and pomp and the style But those wagon loads of mourners they stretched out for more than a mile We wanted to give him a monument we kinda figured we owed him one Cause he made our town a better place for all the good he'd done We pulled up that old hitchin' post where Doc had nailed a sign We'd painted it white and to all of us it certainly did look fine Now the rains and the snows have washed away our white trimmin's of paint There ain't nothin' left but Doc's own sign and that's gettin' pretty faint But you can still see that old hitchin' post as if in answer to our prayers Mutually tellin' the whole wide world Doc Brown has moved upstairs
