Joseph Cross Background

Subject: Joseph Cross Background
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 02:38 PM

Can anyone give me any background to the American Song - Joseph Cross. I know that it had been recorded by June Tabor and Marilyn Middleton Pollock amongst others but I would like to have the info on it please ....

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:07 PM

It was also recorded by an English artiste called Gill Burns who did the folk circuits about 25 years ago. I'm sure there are some notes on her LP (Sight more curious than it sounds) but I was looking for it the other day and can't lay my hand on it.. I'll have a better look later and see what I can find for you.

LTS

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Peace
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:18 PM

Does anyone have the lyrics? I have been looking, but there's a kid named Joseph Cross who did a movie, and it's a real sonuvagun to deal with the song that way using Mr Google.

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:33 PM

Is it the one that starts:

'Word has come to the mission that the old man is failing'?

Guess I'll be looking for that record a bit sooner....

LTS

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Peace
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:33 PM

Thanks, Liz.

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Peace
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:41 PM

Artist: June Tabor
Album: Angel Tiger
Label: Green Linnet
Track: Joseph Cross

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Peace
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:52 PM

Tabor's version can be heard here for .86 of a pound (can't do that pound sign).

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:56 PM

Words and music by Eric Taylor of Houston, Texas. Has an album 'Shameless Love' apparently.

Joseph Cross

Word's come to the mission that the the old man's ailing.
His eyes they are failing and the weather took his hands.
And there's a ring on his finger that's shaped from a bone
From some white man in Missouri, spilled whisky on his wife.

CH: He has travelled the sacred circle
He has travelled the white man's train.
He's killed for hunger his buffalo brother,
He's killed for anger and the white man's name.

His name was Joseph Cross and he was raised by the mission
Just one of a hundred Indian boys who wouldn't tie his shoes.
And he cried the night his grandpa died, he told him in a vision;
'Stay close to the ways of the rattlesnake, stay close to the ways of the grizzly':

In the 1919 chill of December
When the bear and the rattler lay sleeping, hardly breathing,
It's a penny to the kitchen boy to run fetch Sister Lydia,
Go tell her that old Indian lies sleeping, hardly breathing:

Now someone said 'It don't seem right to give him a white man's funeral';
And someone said they'd soon as not float him down the river.
But no-one touched the ring or said a word about his chest,
where it looked like a bear had ripped him and a rattler kissed his cheek:


I'm sorry I can't do anything about the tune.

LTS

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Peace
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 06:57 PM

YEAH, LIZ!

I hope it gets added to the DT.

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 07:01 PM

Eric Taylor and what he says about the song.

"Joseph Cross" is the only song that I've ever sat down and wrote from beginning to end. I had been thinking about attempting a western play. The story is a piece of fiction."

So no real background just an intriguing word picture.

LTS

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Jul 06 - 09:13 PM

Many, many thanks for this everyone. I had had the words and in fact sing it myself but I had learnt in orally and never got to the background. Thanks again .....

Subject: RE: Joseph Cross Background
From: Dan Schatz
Date: 23 Jul 06 - 06:34 PM

Eric Taylor has several albums, all of them good. "Shameless Love," his hard to find first album, is the best, with backing vocals by his then-wife Nanci Griffith. (She's recorded a few of his songs, even after the marriage broke up.) His recent "Scuffletown" is another work of art. Eric Taylor is one of those rare songwriters, like Townes Van Zandt, who has the ability to make a story come alive completely in the music. He also has a unique - and intense - guitar style.

Go see him if you get the chance. I promise it will be worth it.

Dan Schatz