The legend of Rolling Mountain Thunder

He came across the interstate in 1959
with a rusted-up car and a weighted-down mind.
When he couldn't make it up past the Reno line
he turned his car around,
he was lookin to be found,
and the wind howled, "rolling mountain thunder."

So he settled down in Imlay, got the land for cheap,
and he figured out that he was better off a Creek.
With an apocalyptic prophecy to fuel his dreams,
he started it up then--
he built a monument,
while he sang, "rolling mountain thunder."

He welcomed wanderers and vagrants and all their kind--
he was always sympathetic toward a roaming mind.
If you showed up emptyhanded you were let inside,
given a bed and a plate
if you pulled your own weight
and listened to Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Always smokin with a mason jar in one of his hands,
always craftin carefully; he was no simple man.
No one really knew his vision, no one knew his plan.
He made a work of art
from discarded parts--
the great Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder.

I was only nine years old when the great chief died,
when that elder artisan was thinking suicide,
then he went and pulled the trigger neath the blue blue sky.
It was a tragedy.
The monument complete.
And they mourned Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Then the place it went forgotten, started fallin apart.
And the state, it didn't care for some cemented art
standing naked in the desert sun, all bleak and stark,
with painted faces, all,
and bottles in the wall
that remembered Rolling Mountain Thunder.

Then I was coming cross the desolated desert sprawl,
doin eighty on the 80 in the heart of fall
when that great spirit whispered through that bottled wall
and it caught my ear--
it wasn't hard to hear.
It sang, "rolling mountain thunder."

Now all those colored statuettes and all the patchwork rock
smilin out in all directions, a contented flock,
a reminder to remember what the past has wrought--
they are Americans.
We're all Americans.
And we'll sing, "rolling mountain thunder."