I don't care about the hard times.
I don't care about the frost.
All I care is that you get here
Without your little self getting lost.
So pack up your big coat,
Get yourself a ticket for the train,
And sit down in a window seat
So you'll know when you see me again.

Way down in Dixie land,
You know where I'm gonna be:
Sittin' in my easy chair
Till you come rolling down the tracks to me,
Rollin' down the tracks to me.

It's been a long old winter,
A long winter on the road.
And like you said, I sure got tired
The very first time that it snowed.
I didn't have no sleeping bag
To sleep in when the cold wind blows.
All I had was my memories,
And I sure got plenty of those.

Way down in Dixie land,
You know where I'm gonna be:
Sittin' in my easy chair
Till you come rollin' down the tracks to me,
Rollin' down the tracks to me.

Just when I thought it was really the end,
I see your face and I'm back on top again.

Jesse James was a bandit,
An outlaw – I know it's true.
But he would have been an honest man
If he'd had him a woman like you.
I know how it is down in Texas.
Nobody looks you in the face.
But that's all right, 'cos when you get here
We're gonna be the only two in the place.

Way down in Dixie land,
You know where I'm gonna be:
Sittin' in my easy chair
Till you come rollin' down the tracks to me,
Rollin' down the tracks to me.

Words and music by Jim Choukas-Bradley.
Jim Choukas-Bradley: vocals, piano;
Jesse Daumit:  vocals, lead guitar;
Jesse Choukas-Bradley: vocals, rhythm guitar;
Amanda Olsavsky:  vocals;
Julian Addison: vocals;
Jeff Reed: bass;
Larry Ferguson: drums.

Recorded at Levon Helm Studios, Woodstock, NY.
Engineered and mixed by Justin Guip.

I’m not from the South. I grew up in New England and have a Yankee’s views on many things. But I have spent a lot of time in the South, and I love the South. Of course I know of the stain of slavery, and the perversions of the brain and soul that led many white Southerners to believe, or at least convince themselves they believed, that slavery was a moral
good that should be extended throughout the Western Hemisphere, not contained and gradually eliminated. I know it was warped, was evil. And I know slavery’s stain not only colors our past, but that its legacy, physical and mental, lives on in us as a country in many, many ways.

But I fell in love with the South – Southern geography, and Southern culture, and Southern people (black and white and black and white together) and especially Southern music, a long, long time ago, with a young man’s romantic yearning. Rural, not urban, and tinged with the rural even when it was urban. Warm. Hot. Mountain living in anonymity and independence. Simplicity in material things. Making do. Without complaint. Jefferson and Jackson. Populism. The natural world an integral part of everyday life. And music an integral part of being alive. So it’s no surprise that in this tune, one of my earliest songs, a simple song about romance and yearning and wandering and independence, I set the destination for reunion in the South.