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:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“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)