The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59164   Message #940747
Posted By: InOBU
26-Apr-03 - 01:31 PM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: Walking with King (A song about freedom)
Subject: Lyr Add: WALKING WITH KING (Lorcan Otway)
For those of you who remember this song from a few months ago, about the marching ban in New York, or heard it on WBAI, for today's concert, I have rewritten the last two verses... hope ya like it.
Larry

Words Lorcan Otway - Tune Mandella by Danny Hannon

Walking with King

I walked with King in Selma, so I'm getting on in years
But I still recall the hopes we had in spite of all our fears
I still can hear the barking dogs and often in the night
I recall how we gently walked when justified to fight

We walked for voting rights and so that others would be free
While some were kept from basic rights, who could live peaceably
We faced the southern sheriffs and the banal Ku Klux Klan
to carry the light of human right to each corner of the land

Then the Viet Nam war began and we were walking as before
While tens of thousand lives were lost we'd walk to end a war
And many vets walked with us and were welcomed home again
while the government who sent them off ignored their cries of pain

And now the government is marching us off again to war
and people they are gathering to walk just as before
but Bloomberg and Judge Barbara Jones conspired in this night
To stop Americans walking and destroy this sacred right

Many people gathered anyway, the mounted cops appeared.
And the clatter of their hooves echoed, down through out the years
Like the crackle of the musket fire, on Boston's common ground
or the guns on Kent State's campus when the students were shot down.

Remember that its darkest, just before the end of night
No law can bind a rising tide, or sap the whirlwind's might
In Selma Alabama or in Tiananmen Square
The steps of many people will drown out a judge's fear