Melancholy Child

(album: Put Yourself In My Place - 1991)

A baby with a baby
Just barely seventeen
My mother mourned her innocence
As she bounced on her knee
A daddy on the road
Added to the tears and trials
Like silver rain they fell upon this melancholy child

The sounds of my childhood still linger in my song
my mother's lullaby that train that rain behind our home
A whippoorwill on a windowsill It should have made me smile
But everything sounds lonely to a melancholy child

Now a restless blood runs in our family
I thought I could outrun the emptiness inside of me
So I went a little crazy, and I went a little wild
Trying to outdistance my own melancholy child

I met a kind and gentle man who thinks the world of me
When he looks my way, it's a woman that he sees
But when I can't explain to him the tears that fill my eyes
He takes me in his arms and rocks his melancholy child

You take a black Irish temper and some solemn Cherokee
A Southern sense of humor and you got someone like me
There are thorns on every rose, to this I'm reconciled
They're just a little sharper to a melancholy child

And in my own babe's eyes, I see the signs of a melancholy child

Heaven! Help us all another melancholy child!