THE SALT
As recorded by Kevin Conneff on his album "A Week Before Easter"

Come all ye young lads and young lassies
Who hanker to work on a farm
Now be careful when choosing a master
It might serve for to keep yous from harm

When I was a strapping young fellow
Aged about seventeen
I hired meself to a farmer
At the horse fair in Ballynascreen

Now his farm was way up in the mountains
And it all only heather and bog
And me job well I got to look after
His donkey his goat and his dog

Now me, the farmer and his mother
We lived in a tumbledown shack
His mother was well over ninety
With the bones sticking out from her back

It was only a tumbledown ruin
Held up with old yella' clay
The roof it was past all repairing
For the goat had the thatch et' away

His poor mother she'd sleep by the fire
For the rain it came down on her bed
And when I'd get up every morning
She'd be sitting there nodd'n her head

The master was an awful old skinflint
His heart was as hard as a stone
He worked me from daylight 'til darkness
In a month I was just skin and bone

And he fed me on nothing but piners
He said they would make me a man
well they damn well near made me a dead one
Eaten half raw off the pan

Now he had three old hens and a rooster
One day they all died in the coop
So he plucked them he boiled them and salted them
We lived for a month on the soup

Bad luck now it never comes single
For the next day the nanny goat died
So he skint it he boiled it and salted it
And made a bodhran from the hide

It was then poor ol' Neddy the donkey
He broke his hind leg and suffered great pain
So he shot him and skinned him and boiled him
And called for the salt once again.

I thought now his mind was affected
And meself I was going insane
For when poor Fido died of distemper
He called for the salt once again

When I thought what had happened to poor old Fido
I couldn't sleep thinking that night
And when I got up the next morning
I got a most horrible fright

His poor mother was dead be the fire
When I ran for the door he cried "Halt
Where are you going so early
Come back here 'n help me to salt!"

Well went through the door like a rocket
Says I "I'll get out of this fault"
I tripped in the yard with excitement
And out he came running with salt

I took to my heels like a cowboy
And over the hills like a hare
I never stopped running for a fortnight
And I've never gone back to a fair.


Rog