“Paradise” was written by John Prine and appeared on his self-titled debut album in 1971; he re-recorded it for German Afternoons in 1986. It is about Paradise, a small town on the Green River in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Prine grew up in a Chicago suburb, but his parents were from Western Kentucky, and he spent summers as a boy with relatives in Paradise. He has said that he wrote the song mainly for his father, so his father would know he was a songwriter. While Prine was in the Army in Germany, his father sent him a newspaper article saying the coal company had bought out the town.
Paradise stood near the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-fired Paradise power plant, which Peabody Coal supplied from strip mines in the county. The town was bought out by TVA in 1967 and its remaining buildings were bulldozed. In the song a child asks his father to take him back to Muhlenberg County, and is told that Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away. The verses recall trips down the Green River, shooting at empty pop bottles near the abandoned prison at Airdrie Hill, and the coal company’s giant shovel stripping the land. In the last verse the singer asks that his ashes float down the Green River. They were scattered there after his death in 2020, and a park by the Rochester Dam was dedicated to him in 2022.
In 1973, while Peabody was in a dispute with strip-mining opponents, the company circulated a rebuttal titled “Facts vs. Prine,” saying it “probably helped supply the energy” used to make the record. In 1972 and 1973 the Everly Brothers, John Denver, Jackie DeShannon, the Country Gentlemen and the Seldom Scene all recorded it. The Country Gentlemen’s version came out on their Vanguard LP in April 1973 and the Seldom Scene’s on Act Two (Rebel, 1973). Jim & Jesse and the Virginia Boys put it on a 1974 Opryland single and named their 1975 Opryland LP Paradise. Lynn Anderson’s 1976 version reached No. 26 on the Billboard country chart, and Tom T. Hall recorded it the same year.
