Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Ships on the prairie From: Wolfgang Date: 12 Dec 01 - 09:33 AM I love posting these songs, Jerry, for they are well worth preserving. Thanks for correcting my mistakes and thanks for adding personal comments. They give the songs even more life than they already have. If I've understood the 'harvested' signs (^^) correctly, your comments will go together with the songs into the DT database at the time of one of the next updates. Wolfgang |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Ships on the prairie From: Dicho (Frank Staplin) Date: 11 Dec 01 - 03:16 PM Not so many years age, all through the Texas rural areas, you would see the old men playing dominos on the porch of the general store. Now the general store is gone. |
Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Ships on the prairie From: Jerry Rasmussen Date: 11 Dec 01 - 01:44 PM Hi, Wolf and Dicho:
Just a couple of small changes, Wolfgang:
Ships on the prairie that never sailed the sea Good job, Wolfgang. Like a lot of songs I've written, these came from a dream. The night before this song came to me, I was reading Giants In The Earth by Rolvaag for the third time. The opening scenes of the book are so powerful that I fell asleep with those images in my mind. Just before I work up, I saw the image of stopping along a river bank on the prairie, and deciding to bed the cattle settled down for the night. I awoke with the first two lines running through my mind. Some of the lines in this song are from family and friends... the line about still being able to smell the prairie came from an elderly gentlemen I met many years after I left the Midwest. The last verse comes from everywhere. I remember sitting on the front steps of the Cozart Hotel in Clinton, Missouri talking to an old black man who'd carried my bags up stairs... the one night of a six week I slept in a room and not in my car. The old man talked with heavy heart about how all of his kids had to leave the town because the strip mines had played out, and there was no work for them. You're right, Wolfgang and Dicho... old men, the world around, sit at a bar, play cards, go fishing or just sit on a stoop, mourning the loss of what they valued when they were young. Thanks for posting this. Skip Gorman does thia, mixed in with his more traditional cowboy songs, and played fiddle on this song on one of my albums. Jerry^^
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Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Ships on the prairie From: Dicho (Frank Staplin) Date: 11 Dec 01 - 01:03 PM Jerry's song goes into my "songbag." Its image is universal. Here on the prairies, small towns are disappearing as the family farms are replaced by factory-like giants, the smaller business enterprises are displaced by large ones near centers of distribution and everyone goes shopping in the big box stores in the nearest city. The young folks leave and only the old remain. When they die, only the ghostly ruins remain as a monument without epitaph. |
Subject: ADD: Ships on the prairie (Rasmussen) From: Wolfgang Date: 11 Dec 01 - 10:22 AM One more Jerry Rasmussen song. It's a song about a particular stretch of land in the USA and about a particular time, but nevertheless the low and high tide of human and town life are universal. The pictures to transport the feelings would be different in Europe, it would be old men playing boule in France, old men playing tawli (backgammon) in Greece, old men cutting grass or playing cards in Germany, but the feelings would be the same. All errors remaining are mine in this transcription. Wolfgang
SHIPS ON THE PRAIRIE |
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