Gold Whistle Kid

Ben was in New York, legal clerk to Ramsey Clark,
When a cop blew the whistle on the whitewash of the killings
In the jails of Mississippi, over fifty dead it's said,
Where it was still the same.

And Andie was the cop it was her first day on the job,
When she saw a prisoner beaten by the cops who kept repeatin',
"Hey babe, you didn't see this." Oh but when she said she did,
She was a cop no more. And it was like before

They blew the whistle yes they did.
Ben Chaney and the young cop Andie Gibbs.
They rode to Jackson town, and they closed the prisons down,
The Maverick And The Gold Whistle Kid.

There was trouble there before, back in nineteen sixty-four,
From the riders on the trucks with the rifles in the racks,
Then again in eighty-nine, out among the rollin' pine,
Well it was still the same.

Now the jails are teaming, and a legion gone a-missin'
With the suicides,
that aren't really, and the vanished called escapees,
Into this went two, with a memory and a mission,
Where it's still the same, just like yesterday.

Andie's golden whistle did its trick.
For Tisdale of the press called in Jim Evans of the State,
And Dr. Lowery from Atlanta
Who called Chaney in New York.

So it came to pass that the brother of James Earl Chaney
And the daughter of Sister Spirit went to Jackson, Mississippi.
There amid the flashes of the churches and the ashes
That were yesterday.

They brought forensics from Atlanta; the pathologist discovered
That the dead had been embalmed before the autopsies were over,
So the murders were not proved but
Janet Reno closed the jails she ruled
Unfit today, just like yesterday.