Background
Berry wrote the song while still in prison and borrowed an atlas from the prison library to plot the itinerary. The poor boy boarded a Greyhound bus that stopped in Charlotte but "bypassed Rock Hill". The bus rolls on through Atlanta but breaks down in Birmingham. The poor boy boards a train "across Mississippi clean" to New Orleans. He makes it to Houston, where friends stake him to a silk suit, luggage and plane ticket to Los Angeles. Once arrived, he phones home ("Tidewater four, ten-oh-nine") to let the folks back in Norfolk know he's made it to the "promised land".
Read more about this topic: Promised Land (song)
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)