Story Behind The Song

Unfortunately, a true story of a man I met while traveling. I've since met other "Apples".

Lyrics

RED APPLE INDIAN

Joe was only four years old when to the reservation
Came the white missionaries with their Christian salvation.
They came to save the savages so they took him and his brothers
And never did he see again his father or his mother.
The Indian boys were split up and were sent to different schools;
They were given different Christian names as they learned the white man?s rules.
When Joe would speak the Mohawk tongue he was always beat
So he learned to pray in English before he could eat.

Now he lives his life in silence in the daytime and the night
Though he was born a red man, he was raised as white.
He was taken from his people young, in a white man?s world he grew
He?s a rest apple Indian?red, white, and blue.

Joe learned the ways of the white man, now what else could he know
But he never seemed to fit in anywhere he?d go.
Though he acted like a white man, his redness they rejected
And on the reservation he could never be accepted.

The great man Thomas Jefferson once said in his disgust
That he trembled from his country for he knew that God is just.
Now the judgment day may come someday but as far as Joe can tell
For some Christian missionaries, they?ll be a special place in hell.

Copyright 2001 by Paul Reece (ASCAP)