Prison Girl

There's no getting around it. Learning chords can get monotonous and tiring. I'm still working on A, D, and E, and I don't feel comfortable moving on just yet. I'm not fast enough at moving from chord to chord; my fingers don't instinctively know where to go yet.

But I realized as I was practicing last night that if I didn’t do something different for a while, I was going to become really frustrated. “Hey,” I thought, “I wonder if I already know enough to write a little song.” For a while now when I played an A chord, the phrase “I saw her at the store” came to mind. I took my lead from there, and wrote the following verse using A, D, and E chords.

I saw her at the store
She carried letters by her side
And when I looked at her, it’s funny,
She just cried.

I wondered ’bout her story
Was she a pilgrim on a journey?
She saw my question
And here’s what she said:

“I’m a girl just out of prison
These are letters from my children
And now I’m looking for a present
To give my son.”

I call it Prison Girl.

Then, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, it dawned on me that the chord progression for the second stanza (do songs have stanzas?) was very similar to a Johnny Cash tune called “Give My Love to Rose.” It was 11:00, and my wife and I both needed sleep, but I knew I wouldn't be able to rest until I listened to "Give My Love to Rose" (a GREAT song, by the way). Turns out, Cash’s song is about a dying man who was just let out of prison! Without consciously being aware of it (I honestly didn't think about "Give My Love to Rose" until I was in bed), I had borrowed a portion of Cash’s tune and even a part of his song's story for my own! I find this fascinating.