Mainly I picked this song because of the first line: "I was standing on this sidewalk in 1945 in Jacksonville, Illinois." Yesterday's song was about my dad's hometown, and this song starts in my mother's hometown. Jacksonville is in central Illinois; Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived and got the inspiration for so many of his characters, is about an hour to the west, and Springfield, Illinois, the state capitol where Abe Lincoln got his political start, is about a half-hour to the east. Jacksonville is a very pretty town, home of Illinois College, which was founded in 1829 and from which both my parents got their BAs.
Apart from the subject matter, though, this song is a good example of Mary Chapin Carpenter's storytelling. It's about a teenager, blind, deaf, and unable to speak, who was found wandering in Jacksonville in 1945. He spent his life in various institutions and died at the age of 64. In the song, MCC imagines his thoughts going back to his childhood in New Orleans, although in reality nobody was ever able to ascertain where he was from.
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