Play - The River Man

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.

Song Lyrics

John P. Parker lived his life with one foot in the grave
A white man was his father…his mother was a slave
Living in the misery of slavery’s painful grip
His back came to know the bite of a cruel master’s whip

Bought and sold till the Widow Ryder …well she made a deal
To let him earn his freedom in a foundry in Mobile
Then on the banks of the Ohio the best iron man around
Ran that river for the railroad’s secret underground…The River Man

River man was an iron master…by daylight
River man ran a secret freedom train by dark of night
Those who came searching for their promised land
Would cross that water with a helping hand…from The River Man

For fifteen years John put his freedom in harm’s way
He risked his life running that river more and more each day
And with a thousand dollar bounty lying on his head
He rescued many others from the life that he once led…The River Man

CHORUS: (Repeat)

When the war between the states, well it finally came
Men he saved from bondage joined the fight in freedom’s name
Until General Lee surrendered in eighteen sixty-five
‘Tween that foundry and the river, John led a double life…The River Man

CHORUS: (Repeat)