One of our members asked me for the lyrics to this early 1980's song by Vermont's Pete Sutherland. I've always liked his recognition in the song that he was an outsider commenting on other people's lives, and then maybe realizing in the final verse that he really wasn't outside it all. My mother wrote a similar poem back in the early 1930's about the Scotts Run miners of West Virginia, as the mining companies abandoned their holdings for greener fields and hills (for chord placement copy and paste into WORD/Times/12):

SHACKS AND CHALETS

(By Pete Sutherland, © 1982, as sung by the Daglish-Larsen Band)

G-----------------C------G
Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,
-----------Em------------------C
There's a country green and fair;
------------D---------G
Roads are high and winding,
---------------------C-G--D
There's dogwood in the air;
----G----------------C----G
I'm longing to see them mountains,
------Em------------------C
But I think I've had my fill
----------------D---------G/Em
Of the shacks along the river bank
----------D--------------G
And the chalets on the hill.


For it is that same steep country
That they mine the shiny coal;
That's the coal that you burn up north
To break the winter's hold;
And those folks who did and those who don't
They all must either dwell
In the shacks along the river bank
Or the chalets on the hill.

When it's springtime in the mountains,
There's a stirring in the soul,
But it also brings the floods that caused
By stripping off the coal;
And the shacks along the river
Must obey the waters' will;
You can watch them floating down the stream
From the chalets on the hill.

I guess it's wrong to even notice
When you're only passing through;
If folks down there accept things,
Well, I guess I should too;
Still, I kind of wish I lived there
When the land was wild and still,
When the rich man's greed couldn't buy the deed
To the chalet on the hill.

Some folks say it's human nature;
Others say it's just our lot;
The poor folks at the bottom
And the rich folks at the top;
But do you think some day that all will change
When the people have their will?
They'll be no shacks upon the river bank,
And no chalets on the hill?
No more shacks upon the river bank,
No chalets on the hill.

Charley Noble