Drive just eleven miles east of Athens
and you’ll come to New York,
population fifteen.
Founded over
one hundred and fifty years ago,
the town never really got off the ground
– not with sprawling Jacksonville,
all fourteen thousand citizens,
so nearby.
Still, it does what it can.
If you ever stop by, try
their delicious New York Texas Cheesecake
though that moved ten years ago to Athens, too.

Geography gets funny in east Texas.
It was all so gosh darned big, they just plumb ran out of names.
Yeah, the towns, they sound familiar in east Texas
after they started picking places of real fame.

Right near the tip of Mexico lies Texas, New York
just abutting the southeastern end of Lake Ontario.
It’s small, but then, so is Mexico, New York,
the Mother of Towns,
where roughly fifty two hundred folk live together
in peace and harmony
– no walls required.
This is, of course, the town of Mexico,
not the village of Mexico within it.
Don’t confuse them – or the natives’ll go ape.

Western New York’s got a lot of places
and dirt roads you might tread upon while walking on bare feet. Seems someone got real bored of naming places
so some of the small towns got a repeat.

Alaska can be found in West Virginia and Wisconsin
and Indiana – which, too, can be found east in P-A.
Tennessee’s in Illinois; Oregon’s all over.
This unoriginality’s occurring every day.

Jim Thorpe was dead when he moved to Pennsylvania

and almost immediately he actually became the town.
Jim Thorpe, P-A is in Carbon County
which has less than five thousand residents – they almost lost one
when the Court’s ruled whether Thorpe should be sent back

to Sac and Fox nation, but Jim’s staying put.
The guy Chevy Chase
wasn’t named after the place Chevy Chase,
but rather, a Scots hero.
His aristocratic grandma thought it was a good idea.
Grandma’s, am I right?

Geography gets strange here in this country.
We’re so new and yet we can’t help but run out of good names.
From Washington to Lincoln to Boulevards for M L K,
it seems all of our damned names are all the same.