Lyrics

Jimmy Joe, the hippybilly boy Well, it's hard to say what it was that started him down the long, piney trail to freakhood Maybe it was when his cousin Kathleen got run over by a bulldozer Or maybe it was the six-o'clock news, I don't know But all of a sudden, he let his hair grow long, long, Lord, long And he wore love beads around his neck and he started making weird things down in shop class Lord, Lord, Lord Jimmy Joe, the hippybilly boy His teachers didn't mind so much the love beads or when he wore body paint to the prom But, buddy, when he came to the county track meet and wore nothing but a purple petrified taper-snout for an athletic supporter Boy, he got snuffed out of school He didn't mind Most of the time he stayed out in the woods and wrote poetry By Summer, he harvested seventeen bails of hemp alongside the railroad tracks, and... He stopped going to Christian youth fellowship, and... He even tried to get my daughter Carolyn to go out in the woods to meditate with him Lord, Lord, Lord Jimmy Joe, the hippybilly boy Well, he saw something he called a "vision of the grail" on a muskrat run near his home here in Kabul And believe in magic, there's a joke all over town about how they oughta put up a chainlink fence around the graveyard Folks didn't know what they were seeing He wore an Osage Indian headband and he wouldn't go out for football, even thought he'd been a star left halfback in the tristate junior high school midget football league People'd say, "Jimmy Joe, why don't you just go on off to San Francisco?" And Jimmy'd smile and he'd say, "Well, I love the Ozarks and I love the limestone caves and the ridges and the purple mists" "And I love the veils and veils of [?]" Lord, Lord, Lord Jimmy Joe, the hippybilly boy Well, he was out by the big blue river on Saturday night late Meditating and writing poetry And he saw far below, a pair of car lights on the highway Then they went wobbly and he heard a crash And he saw the car go over the side of the big blue river And Jimmy ran down to the riverbank But all he could see was gurgles and bubbles rising where the car had gone under the water So he ripped off his clothes and he stood there naked in the moonlight with his Osage headband glistening And he did a forward one-and-a-half somersault with a half-twist And went down into the cold, murky murk of the big blue river And he had to go real deep, but somehow he found the car and he got the car door open And he pulled out the people inside, ol' Nadine Hefner and Danny Whistler And he got 'em up on the riverbank and then he began to worry that maybe there was somebody else down in the car trapped So he went back down into the abysmal, dismal depths of the big blue river And he never came up Fifteen minutes later, the state police went down to get him And they found Jimmy Joe with his long, brown hair wrapped around the rear-view mirror Oh, the whole town came out to Jimmy's funeral And Reverend Alan read some of Jimmy's poetry And Lord, Lord, Lord, they weeped just as loud before a hippybilly boy as they weeped for anybody else And as they carried the plain, brown, bronze casket from the graveyard The country choir sang the Lordly hymn... What a Friend we have in Jesus All our sins and griefs to bear What a Friend we have in Jesus Everything to God in prayer O, what peace we often forfeit Everything to God in prayer What a Friend we have in Jesus Everything to God in prayer Lord, Lord, Lord Jimmy Joe, the hippybilly boy