GHOSTS OF THE BAKER HOTEL

Oh, the hills wore bluebonnets in the first days of spring,
when he rode back from Dallas with a big diamond ring.
No one here today would remember her name,
but Jenny got married on a passenger train.
When the wells started flowing, those hills came alive
at a place where the water could heal and revive,
and a city was built on the dreams they could sell
when they first ran the railroad to Mineral Wells.

From the limestone her trusses and towers would climb
above the west Texas desert - 1929.
Movie stars, politicians, the rich and the poor,
they would all beat a path to The Grand Lady's door.
They danced in her ballrooms, they sang in her streets,
as the great well kept churning up gold at their feet,
but then fate took its toll when the stock market fell,
so say the ghosts of The Baker Hotel.

And tonight as a shooting star falls to the earth,
then fades in the east toward the lights of Fort Worth,
you might hear a whisper from the West Mountain ridge
as two shadows linger at the swimming pool bridge,
then the faint, distant murmur of the crowd up inside,
Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, maybe Bonnie & Clyde.
Their warm summer secrets, no tongue can tell,
except for the ghosts of The Baker Hotel.

So the hills wear bluebonnets as if time has not flown,
but the calendar says that it's ninety years on.
The Brazos still runs past the west side of town,
but the springs and the wellheads have all been shut down.
And the songs and the laughter have all been undone
by the rumbling of engines on 281
where she stands by the highway in her crumbling shell,
forty some-odd years now she's been up for sale,
in a city that's devoid of all clientele,
except for the ghosts of The Baker Hotel.