Simple Math (Jim Lauderdale)

Nine bucks a day to pave the road in 1928
Next year he couldn’t even buy the tags
Daddy had to park his truck in 1929
Twelve month to go from riches down to rags

Ten cents a dozen eggs and that’s a gallon kerosene
Riding six miles to the store and back
We traded eggs for coffee, and some for sugar, too
You got no eggs you drink your coffee black

Can’t spend the money you don’t have
That’s how it works, it’s simple math

Ten months from the planting to the threshing of the wheat
Then took it down and banked it at the mill
We drew the flour out of there, one hundred pounds a time
And never even touched a dollar bill

In 1945 I sang on WFMD
Selling baby chicks and ladies’ hose
Every thousand orders, I’d make a hundred bucks
One Wiseman hit the big time, don’t you know

Can’t spend the money you don’t have
That’s how it works, it’s simple math

From Knoxville to Chicago was about six hundred miles
On two lane roads in 1946
Three hours was a session, at forty bucks apiece
For singing songs and playing country licks

Me and Molly O’Day and three other mountain folks
Cut sixteen songs in two nine-hour days
Two hundred forty dollars, man, they cut me one big check
All I did was pick a borrowed doghouse bass

Can’t spend the money you don’t have
That’s how it works, it’s simple math
That’s all it is, just simple math