Lyr Add: Lee Fore Brace

Subject: Lee Fore Brace
From: radriano
Date: 30 May 00 - 04:23 PM

Well, Joe Offer, you asked for it and here it is. There were a few phrases I wasn't sure about but one of the member of Landlocked e-mailed me the original words. There is one phrase where I kept what I thought I heard rather than what was really there. In the original version the second line of the third verse read, a Dago fiddler's tune, and I liked the phrase, a good old fidder's tune, a lot better.

Lee Fore Brace
Words by C. Fox Smith; melody by A. Fitzsimmons

There were ten men hauling on the lee fore brace
In the rain and the driving hail
And the mile-long greybeards charging by
In a thundering Cape Horn gale

That dark it was, you scarce could see
Your hands before your face
That cold it was, our fingers froze
Stiff as they gripped the brace

And Christ, said Dan, for a night in port
For a good old fiddler's tune
And just one whiff of the drinks again
In a Calleo saloon

There were ten men hauling on the lee fore brace
When the big sea broke on board
Like a stream in spate and a foaming flood
Right fore and aft did pour

And the ship she staggered and lay still
So deep, so dead lay she
Why you think she could not rise again
From such a weight of sea

There were ten men hauling on the lee fore brace
Seven when she rose at last
And the rest were lost to the pitch dark night
To the sea and the ice-cold blast

And one of them was Dago Pete
One was Lars, the Dane
And the third was a lad whose like on earth
I shall not find again

So I'll stand my wheel and I'll heave and haul
And I'll reef and I'll furl with the rest
For the winds and seas they go in the same
When they've took and they've drowned the best

And there ain't no sense to curse the Lord
There ain't no sense to moan
For a man must live with his life the same
And keep his grief his own

So I'll drink me drink and I'll sing me song
And nobody'll know but me
That a lump of me heart, it went down with Dan
That night in the wild Horn sea

From the CD Where Seagulls Dare, by the English shanty group Landlocked. I will post the ABC notation just as soon as I work it out.

radriano