The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #41051   Message #593447
Posted By: Stewart
15-Nov-01 - 02:58 PM
Thread Name: Help: Songs to celebrate community
Subject: RE: Help: Songs to celebrate community
There's a great song by Zeke Hoskin about landlords.

THE LANDLORDS
Zeke Hoskin

In a time without mercy, they cleared the Highlands
Evicted the people to make room for sheep
Uprooted the crofters from stony half-acres
To cross the Atlantic so stormy and deep
To a land without lairds, where ye're no hanged for hunting
And a square mile of land's any settler's to hold
There's more Scots in my land than e'er walked the Highland
They've built a new country more fair than the old.

CHO:
So here's to the landlords, you vile sons of bitches
Who sundered our people from the lands of their birth
For your cold ancient castles and blood-spattered riches
You condemned our ancestors to inherit the earth

The absentee landlords sucked Ireland's blood
While starvation was reaping Kilkenny to Cork
There was no hope in life but to ship out in steerage
Where the great lady stands at the gates of New York
To be cops and cowpunchers and labourers and lawyers
In a new land that Cromwell had never suppressed
More Irish eyes smile in Ohio than Antrim
The wild geese have flown to a far better nest

We'v plundered this land from the Cree and the Chippewa
Iroquois, Blackfoot, Algonquin and Sioux
We herd them to slumlands and try to forget them
While they rot there in squalor with fuck-all to do
And some year, our great ships will take them and dump them
On Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, and Mars
They'll weep for old Earth and they'll curse us for bastards
While their grandchildren grow to inherit the stars

Cheers, S. in Seattle