Reynoldstown: Mill Town's Next Door Neighbor

Lyrics

[Intro]Just a set of tracks.Just a line of iron and wood.[Verse 1]On our side, the air was thick with cotton dust.Thick with the sound of the looms from the Fulton Bag Mill.The smell of cabbage boiling on a Tuesday.Appalachian vowels, sharp and tired.We knew our streets. Wylie, Pearl, Carroll.We knew our world ended at the culvert.At the Georgia Railroad line.[Verse 2]On your side, a different promise.A different kind of freedom, bought so dear.They say a man named James Reynolds owned land there.After the war.You built homes with hands that knew hard labor.Heard the same train whistle, but it sang a different song for you.Of somewhere else to be.Of a wage from the railroad yard.Mount Moriah Baptist Church raising its voice on a Sunday.[Chorus]And the soot from the freight trains,it fell on your porches, it fell on our roofs.Two working towns, breathing the same industrial air.Sharing a fence we never spoke across.Just the rumble of the evening train between us.Reynoldstown. Cabbagetown.A stone's throw. A world away.[Verse 3]Your shotgun shacks lined up neat on Manigault.Ours did the same on Berean Avenue.Same narrow rooms, same long hallways.Same hope for a little more at the end of the week.Did you hear our arguments through the thin walls?We heard your hymns.A quiet music across the tracks.[Bridge]The looms are silent now.The whistles don't blow.The iron's been pulled up, the wood rotted away.And in its place, a ribbon of concrete.They call it the BeltLine.People walk it now, jog right over the line.They don't know it was a wall.They just feel the sun.[Chorus]And the soot from the freight trains,is just a memory in the brick.Two working towns, breathing the same hopeful air.Sharing a path we never had before.Just the quiet hum of bicycle wheels between us.Reynoldstown. Cabbagetown.A handshake. A world away.[Outro]A world away.Just next door.