Play with the song for timing, there's a good recording of it on Ardent Presents Cory Branan Em: 022000 B: x21200 A: 002200 C: x32010 D: 2x023x G: 320003 F#: 2xx0xx Em, B Em, A Em, B, Em Em Just after Appomattox B two last bullets and a bell Em A for the honest and the after Em B Em that the tragic curtain fell There beneath the flood of headlines and the Mississippi spray the wreck of the Sultana lies buried to this day C D G D buried to this day, boys G, F# (bend E string), Em (Continued for the rest of the song) The Sultana was a steamboat she made a New Orleans - Carol run when a greedy Captain Mason heard that since the war is done And the union POWs are free now, Uncle Sam is paying for their passage home, five dollars every man Well that's four a head, the Captain said calculating calm a dollar per to the officers should grease the Judas paw So on a steamboat built to carry three fifty with crew twenty three hundred herded a huddled multitude of purple scars and leather shadows, midtattered, stitched and torn What little's always left of glory's human uniform a human uniform, boys And when you figure in civilian men, women, children too there's five hundred more plus the horses, cargo, coal and crew And so it was and it wasn't the number's that night you see the boiler needed grave repairs but the Captain had rushed a patch job so as not to lose one precious fare And so, asleep, afloat beneath a sleepy Memphis sky it came to pass a flame, a flash and death, she opened wide And the force of the blast took the fortunate, fast asleep, dreams to dust but the rest awoke, chest to boat, with the thunder and the thrust As the smokestacks smashed through the upper decks, a screaming axe had fell and a splintered rain of men and flames pinned in a crush of hell And diving in, the drowning men, entangled anchor's roar their frantic limbs heavy in the anesthetic coal And it was swollen ?that's a silence?, the river reaked her spoils as the stoney moon stared on and on where the ?general recoiled? Until the morning sun rose warm upon the lucky living through the hell and the highwater maze he'd steered them straight into I ain't saying the Captain's evil I ain't saying he's any good just whereever he stood to profit that's where he stood He may have stood until the flames forked over paid dearly what the river pulls down but all the accounts will tell you how his body was never found It was the end of the Sultana the end of many good men as well so for now we'll end the story that couldn't count on time to tell Though deadlier than the Titanic's legendary fall I guess it's less romantic, mostly soldiers after all More dead than Shiloh, Chickamauga and others lesser known more anthems send a soldier off than ever sing him home than ever sing him home, boys