American Colonial Revival: Echoes of Empire

Lyrics

[Intro]
You were a prayer on paper first.
A wish drawn in India ink.
A straight line, seeking order.
A perfect, balanced thought.

[Verse 1]
It was nineteen twenty-three.
The Great War was a fading scar.
And here, in the Georgia heat, a different hunger grew.
H. Gordon Jones wanted a history he could walk through.
A past he could own, solid and new.
He didn’t want the chaos. He wanted the calm.
He wanted a blueprint that sang a quiet psalm.

[Chorus]
American Colonial Revival.
A clean and noble story.
Give me symmetry, a door in the dead center.
Give me white columns holding up the memory of glory.
It's an echo of empire, in brick and in timber.
A beautiful fiction to help us remember.
Or to help us forget.

[Verse 2]
Francis Palmer Smith, his sharp-leaded pencil.
He and Robert Pringle knew the spell.
They drew this dream three hundred times over,
Across the rising hills of Buckhead.
Each gabled roof, a declaration.
Each balanced window, a new foundation.
It wasn't just a house being built on the clay.
It was an argument, winning the day.

[Chorus]
American Colonial Revival.
A clean and noble story.
Give me symmetry, a door in the dead center.
Give me white columns holding up the memory of glory.
It's an echo of empire, in brick and in timber.
A beautiful fiction to help us remember.
Or to help us forget.

[Bridge]
But a revival is a memory of a memory, isn't it?
Polished and perfected, with none of the grit.
You took a story that was never quite so clean,
And made it symmetrical, a placid, grand scene.
You hid the modern wires inside the colonial wall.
A picturesque past, standing proud and tall.
An elegant answer, before anyone could ask.

[Outro]
And the prayer on paper became a home.
An echo in the pines.
An empire of the domestic, built on well-drawn lines.
Twenty-one Cherokee Road.
Still standing.
Still telling that story.
That beautiful, balanced story.