My father was from North Carolina but his family was from South Carolina. Coming into this world when Taft was President the world he knew was completely different from the one I knew when John Kennedy was my childhood President.
In my youth I criss-crossed the Carolina country so many times I thought it would never end, and then it did. I moved away to college and away from home in New Jersey. While I would go home on holiday I never again would make the family trip up and down the old US highways that weaved down the tidewater to Horry County, SC.
Even from the days I first began hearing this song it always was tied to my father for me. He longed for the Carolina of his youth but by the time he was in his sixties it was gone. He had thought about moving back and talked of it a hundred times. But one day when he talked to my great uncle Vance who had moved back down south after years in New York he knew such a move would be a mistake.
Up until the day he died he was wistful about those days he spent growing up there. This song is about as wistful as they get.
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