HELLO FRIEND
(Peggy Seeger)

Hello friend, I see you're a stranger. Where do you come from?
Hello friend, something in your face reminds me of the sun;
But the northern light is thin against the darkness of your skin,
Hello friend, I'm glad that you could come.

When you talk, I hear the echo of the places you have been;
When you walk, colours all around you fluttering in the wind;
When I listen to your song, I feel you really do belong;
Am I the stranger, the one who's just come in?

A I think I know what made you come here but what made you want to stay?
Will you go if the weather and the welcome seem too cold and grey?
Do you feel you'll never find all the warmth you left behind?
Never mind - I hope you want to stay.

Did you find new friends to help you? Can you earn a living here?
Do you mind the smoke and grime around you and the warning loud and clear?
Or did your troubles just begin with the colour of your skin?
Never mind - I'm glad to see you here.

Did you come to climb a mountain and end up in a hole?
Have you won the right to join our people signing on the dole?
Can you be happy here amid suspicion and the fear,
Or will you run, and never more return?

Hello friend, all of us are strangers in this green and pleasant land.
Once again battle ranks are forming and we need a friendly hand.
Yours the fear and ours the shame, but our goal is just the same,
In the end this will be our native land.

Copyright Peggy Seeger, 1992

From The Peggy Seeger Songbook, 1998

Music note: I borrowed melodic ideas from this song to make "Old Friend."

We were giving a week-long songwriting seminar in Birmingham. It rained the whole week and a cold front swept in. OK, but it was July. At bus-stops and on church steps were bouquets of the bright, fluttering colours worn by Pakistanis, Indians, West Indians, and Africans, out in force to celebrate if not the Sabbath at least the day of no-work. The light fabrics were no match for an English summer day and many dark faces looked pinched and ashen with the cold. Enoch Powell (MP for Wolverhampton at the time) had just fired his first "rivers of blood" salvo across the bows of a multiracial Britain, advocating mass repatriation as the only way to salvage our traditional way of life. No matter that many stores were now stocked with an endless variety of new foods, textiles, and crafts that had arrived with the immigrants. No matter that these darker people filled menial jobs that lighter people were now able to forsake (much as men feel above a job category when women begin to habitually fill it). No matter that a number of incomernationalities were not targeted (North Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Europeans). Ewan took the morning workshop while I wrote this song. (Peggy Seeger)

filename[ HELLOFND
JRO
Apr01 ^^

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Hope I didn't duplicate your efforts, Bernard. Seemed to be easier to scan the songbook.
-Joe Offer-