The River Man 4:33 Dave Adkins

The River Man – David Adkins
(Paula Breedlove, Mark “Brink” Brinkman)
Paulajon Music – ASCAP/Mark Brinkman Songs – BMI

“A more fearless creature never lived. He gloried in danger. He would go boldly over into the enemy’s camp and filch the fugitives to freedom.” – The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, written shortly after Parker’s death



By the age of 8, John P. Parker had been ripped from his mother’s arms and forced to walk from his home in Virginia to Mobile, Alabama. He spent the next decade as a slave, working at an iron foundry where he showed a great aptitude for the work, and for invention. At 18, he had earned enough to buy his freedom from the Widow Ryder, and he moved north, where he married and settled on the banks of the Ohio River. He spent the rest of his life there in Ripley, Ohio, an iron worker by day and a conductor on the Underground Railroad by night. Risking constant danger, Parker carried hundreds of men, women, and children over the river to the freedom that lay on the other side. He continued fighting for justice until 1910, when he died in his bed surrounded by family as a free man.