Where The Devil Don't Stay A Ghost To Most Drive By Truckers

Where The Devil Don't Stay Album: The Dirty South (2008)
A Ghost To Most Album: Brighter Than Creation's Dark (2008)
by Drive By Truckers

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes.

Where the Devil Don't Stay tells the band's unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers' albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band's members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author's hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers' complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don't Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it's a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

Where the Devil Don't Stay
Drive-By Truckers
Written by: John Cooley

My daddy played poker in the woods, they say
Back in his younger days
Prohibition was the talk, but the rich folks walked
To the woods where my daddy stayed

Jugs and jars from shiners
These old boys here, they ain't miners
They came from The Twenty Niners
It didn't take a hole in the ground to put the bottom in their face

Back in the 30's when the dust bowl dried
And the woods of Alabama didn't see no light
My daddy played poker by a hard wood fire
Squeezing all his luck from a hot copper wire

Scrap like a wildcat fights 'til the end
Trap a wildcat and take his skin
Deal from the bottom, put the ace in the hole
One hand on the jug, but you never do know

Son come running
You better come quick
This rotgut moonshine is making me sick
Your mama called the law
And they're gonna take me away
Down so far even the devil won't stay

Where I call to the Lord with all my soul
I can hear him rattling the chains on the door
He couldn't get in, I could see he tried
Through the shadows of the cage around the 40 watt light

Daddy, tell me another story
Tell me 'bout the lows and the highs
Tell me how to tell the difference 'tween
What they tell me is the truth or a lie

Tell me why the ones who have so much
Make the ones who don't go mad?
With the same skin stretched over their white bones
And the same jug in their hand

My daddy played poker on a stump in the woods
Back when the world was gray
Before black and white went and chose upsides
And gave a little bit of both their way

The only blood that's any cleaner
Is the blood that's blue or greener
Without either you just get meaner
And the blood you gave, gives you away

Son, come running
You better come quick
This rotgut moonshine is making me sick
Your mama called the law
And they're gonna take me away
Down so far even the devil won't stay

Where I call to the Lord with all my soul
I can hear him rattling the chains on the door
He couldn't get in, I could see he tried
Through the shadows of the cage around the 40 watt light