Jeni Hankins & Billy Kemp: Listen & Lyrics

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I crafted the lyric for "Oxycodone" out of two events. In January of this year, Billy and I went to the Steelworkers Union to hear John Edwards speak. A Union organizer introduced Edwards and, in doing so, mentioned those who "go along to get along." He encouraged the audience to fight this way of living and thinking and encouraged us to support John Edwards' war on poverty. I felt there was a song in these lines and wrote them down in a book that Billy and I always carry with us.
The second event that inspired this song was our reading of Nick Miroff's feature story in the Washington Post "A Dark Addiction." Writing out of my home county of Tazewell, Virginia, he described the grinding routine of a miner detoxing from an Oxycontin addiction. Prescription drug abuse is a major public health crisis in Southwest Virginia and not one easily solved. The cycle of job injury, addiction and detoxification has become a way of life there for too many miners and this song is meant to tell their story and honor their loss.
For more please follow this link to the story as Nick Miroff so deftly reports it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/01/12/ST2008011201184.html
Billy and I wrote the melody together and we were fortunate again to have fiddler Shad Cobb play what to me is the sound of all of the sweet things that can be lost to us.

As I tip up my white paper cup,
I think on what Daddy once said,
“If you go along, to get along,
Son, you’d be better off dead.”

But the methadone seeps in my bones
and Daddy, he loses his hold.
A twelve dollar fix, the methadone clicks,
and, then, it’s down to the coal.

Down in the cave, ain’t nobody saved
from fear it’ll be their last time.
Daddy once said, “Son, keep your head,
‘cause life, it can turn on a dime.
Son, just look at mine.”

A mobile home, disconnected phone,
a fortune shot up my veins.
It’s three a.m., to the clinic again,
the county says “its a shame.”

Oxycodone has wrecked my home
and I ain’t seen Daddy for years.
Our last goodbye I was high
and Daddy was fightin’ back tears.

Down in the cave, ain’t nobody saved
from fear it’ll be their last time.
Daddy once said, “Son, keep your head,
‘cause life, it can turn on a dime.
Son, just look at mine.”

Daddy once said, “Son, keep your head,
‘cause life, it can turn on a dime.
Son, just look at mine.”