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User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
Wolfgang Hell Lyr Add: Blue Tar Road & other songs (Liam Weldon) (37) Lyr Add: BLUE TAR ROAD (Liam Weldon) 22 Jan 98


In the "Songs about the homeless" thread, Martin Ryan has mentioned Liam Weldon's song "Blue tar road". Below you find my transcription from Weldon's vinyl "Dark horse on the wind". Every time I listen to him singing this fine mixture of traditional and his own songs I wonder why he isn't much better known than he actually is.

Martin, by the way, do you happen to know any Weldon songbook? Some other songs from him are much more difficult for me to understand than "Blue tar road". And please correct my mistakes in the one below. Shouldn't be too many, this time.

BLUE TAR ROAD
(Liam Weldon)

1. I am a true-born Irishman,
A traveller am I,
My home the road, no fixed abode,
I must travel 'til I die.
For few been given me camping space,
Aye, and fewer called me friend.
The hard road for the travelling man,
I must ravel 'til the end.

Hunger, hardship and poverty
Are the traveller's weary load,
Hunger, hardship, and poverty,
And the blue tar road.

2. I came to Dublin City fair
In the year of '59,
And I camped in Lansdowns green valley
With others of my kind.
But Dublin's corporation,
Good Christians to a man,
Drug down our tents, uprooted us,
Dragged out our caravans.

3. Out here in Cherry Orchards
No cherry blossoms bloom.
We're forgotten and unwanted
In dark, and muck, and gloom,
But the Man above who died for Love,
And nailed unto a tree,
Sure was, wasn't he, a traveller,
The same as you and me.

And please God, in his own good time,
He'll lift the travellers' load,
And we'll bid farewell to poverty
And the blue tar road.


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