Tudor Revival: An English Fantasy in Georgia

Lyrics

[Intro]
I'm standing on your street, Berkeley Road.
No, it's Exeter.
You wear your name like a well-made costume.
A perfect fit.

[Verse 1]
It was 1924.
George Francis Willis, forty-nine years old, with a memory of a place he’d never lived.
Shakespeare's Stratford, a ghost on his tongue.
He bought nine hundred acres of farmland, felt the red Georgia clay under his heel.
Smelled the pine and saw a different kind of timber.
He whispered, "I shall give Georgia a model city."
A cultural center. A place of charm.

[Chorus]
You are an English fantasy in the Georgia heat.
Half-timbered walls on a storybook street.
Your steep gabled roof cuts a foreign line against the longleaf pine.
You weren't born from this soil.
You were built from a grand design.

[Verse 2]
They dug the basin and the water filled it in. Called it Lake Avondale.
And for good measure, he brought the swans over.
All the way from England, two white questions floating on the water.
Did they remember a colder river?
He planned a dairy, an apiary, a world entire unto itself.
Your casement windows have so many small panes, watching the humidity gather.

[Chorus]
You are an English fantasy in the Georgia heat.
Half-timbered walls on a storybook street.
Your steep gabled roof cuts a foreign line against the longleaf pine.
You weren't born from this soil.
You were built from a grand design.

[Bridge]
I can almost hear the hammers from the nineteen-twenties.
The sound of an idea being nailed into place.
A performance for whom?
An answer to the wild, untamed green of a Georgia summer?
He wanted an envy for the South to hold.
And he built one, out of brick and stucco and will.

[Outro]
The sun sets behind your prominent chimney.
You cast a long, Tudor shadow.
It stretches all the way from Warwickshire.
And settles here.
Right here.