The old man’s gone off to the hills now

Though it’s frosted over outside

He went off real quiet now

Like the winter momma died.

He won’t be going off to pray now

Praying man don’t need a gun.

I know, lord, it’s been coming on

Since he was twenty-one.



Living in the county was mighty hard

For a haunted woman and a bastard child.

She had no love to give him

The mountains raised him wild.

A lonely woman possessed by devils

And a boy believing in the wind

Scratched a living from a hillside farm

Till the bad times settled on them.



He went down to the city

In 1929

And slaved for flatland wages

To save their place from the mines.

At 21 he came back home

To put his mother in the grave

Going up to the mountain like Moses

He grieved his mother and prayed.



He took a wife in ‘35

I was born the very next spring

We ploughed good rows

And made the crops grow

And made a lot of living.

The hills are in your veins he said

You come from mountain ground

They’ll stir the blood inside your head

Like a wind that has no sound.



Two years later in the winter time

Gabriel made a claim

And Moses went to the mountain once more

To grieve and call her name.







Now the crops we need are gone

A killing frost is to blame

And the old man’s gone to hills now

But his leaving’s not the same.

The wind howling down the mountain

Stirs the senses of my mind

The old man wants me to go now

And leave these hills behind.

The wind howling down the mountain

Tells me Gabriel made a claim

Moses took his gun to the mountain

And he won’t come back again.