Appalachian Migration: The Hands That Built the Mill

Lyrics

Do you remember the quiet, Sarah?
The way the wind spoke in the hemlocks.
A different kind of breathing.
Before this city.
Before the hum.

[Verse 1]
The soil was thin and the winters long.
Said our prayers to a stony field.
Then word came down the mountain.
A man named Jacob Elsas built a red brick river in Atlanta.
Eighteen eighty-one.
Promised a wage, a steady thing.
A different kind of harvest.
So we packed the quilt and the good skillet, and walked away from the sky.

[Chorus]
We traded the ridgeline for a smokestack.
We traded the creek song for the company store.
Traded the wind in the pines for the clatter and the hum.
They call us 'lint heads' now, hair gone white with cotton dust.
And we answer.

[Verse 2]
We live in a long box now, door to door.
You can see straight through to the neighbor's wash.
The air tastes of machine oil, and the whole street smells of cabbage boiling when the shifts change.
Twelve hours.
My own hands, your hands, even the children's hands...
they know the rhythm.
They know the loom.

[Chorus]
We traded the ridgeline for a smokestack.
We traded the creek song for the company store.
Traded the wind in the pines for the clatter and the hum.
They call us 'lint heads' now, hair gone white with cotton dust.
And we answer.

[Bridge]
But sometimes, at dusk, when the whistle blows...
we sit on these narrow porches.
Someone pulls out a fiddle.
And for a moment, the tune is the same one we heard in the holler.
For a moment, we're not just hands for the mill.
We are still ourselves, I think.
Under all this dust.

[Outro]
The hum... it gets inside you.
It's a lullaby, after a while.
Go to sleep.
The whistle will call for us soon.