Lyrics Page

This album opens with a blues that I wrote sitting on the porch with an autoharp and a glass of beer. Going Nowhere combines images from a trip on The Empire Builder with visions of a single Mother and baby I shared a bus ride with a long time ago. On harmonica is my good friend Mike Janes from Juneau Alaska, who also closes the album with our instrumental tribute to The Siegel Schwall Blues Band from Chicago.

What's a Working Man To Do is simply about the dramatic and destructive changes in our economy, from a Post World War II industrial boom to the closing of factories and the replacement of union jobs with service sector jobs and their subsequent low wages.

Life is Painful is a talker set to music. It's tongue in cheek and in your face at the same time, especially if you are walking along feeling sorry for yourself and complaining about your depression. The guitar on the recording is played by Sara Brooks, the speed metal member of our family and it makes for a lethal combination of word and music.

This is a disaster waiting to happen and for the sake of lower costs, higher profits corporate America will put us all at risk. This is just another example of the same old thing.

This song's a couple of years old now but the reality is still there; tax cuts for the wealthy and a deepening gap between the rich and the poor. It is as bad now as it was immediately before the stock market crash and Great Depression!

Georgia Theresa Gilmore said “The food is smells like heaven. And I sure do have a hunger.

Why it makes me want to sing” . She laughed a great surprise and their were tears in her eyes

The Bouncer nodded slowly “You know I heard about your story, and I am really sorry but you can’t come in today.

In a one week period I wrote 7 songs and then a friend said, "You ought to write one about Social Security." Here's number eight.

Smoking cigarettes while they’re waiting to enter where their life’s blood’s sold

Here are a couple songs from earlier recordings.

Another song about work, hard work, and about the people who do it. And guess what, a lot of them are and have been immigrants!

Child of Immigration

I am a night shift weldor, waiting for the dawn

Sweating over steel with a smoking electric gun

Building big earth movers to tear up Mother's ground

And making union wages, blue‑collar dreams pinned down.

My father was a stillman in an oil refinery

His father came from Europe to make money and be free

Came to work the steel mills and to raise a family

The poison of the steel dust killed him though they blamed it on TB

I am a country farmer working out in my fields

Keeping my machines up and increasing all my yields

I'm the backbone of my country in the breadbasket of the land

Putting food on peoples tables with the labor of my hands.

My parents came from Norway to till the prairie ground

Mine were European Gypsies who came here to settle down

Sometimes they called us squareheads,

sometimes they called us round,

We settled in the mountains, we settled in the towns.

I'm the land of immigration, they call me melting pot

I've a coat of many colors and I'll tell you what I'm not

I'm not a rubber stamp, I'm not a pre‑fit mold

But I can take your foreign steel and refine it into gold

I'm not a thoroughbred, I'm not a pedigree

Just a shaggy friendly mutt, that's the way I want to be

My people they are Christian, my people they are Jews

My people they are Muslim, my people are Hindu.

Sometimes I like the foreigners and there are times I don't

Sometimes I think they'll steal my job

There are times I know they won't

The thing that keeps me honest is to remember who I am

I'm the child of immigration in

An Immigrated Land

I had a friend that everybody called Duke. In WWII he worked out of England flying B-17s. He was also a storyteller and I heard hundreds of them over the years. The scars of war affect veterans in many ways. Most of them cope with their scars and that allows us the luxury of romanticizing their experiences and their wars, and thus we feel free to keep going to war. Sometimes the coping mechanisms that people use are destructive forces in themselves and they end up masking the true sources of a person's dysfunction.

My house sits longs side a railroad track and I cross that bridge to get myself back

and forth to work bout every day and once in awhile along the way I meet some fella

One day in the Fall on my way back I ran into a man called Smiling Jack by those that

knew him, that called him friend, a train had just passed around the bend, and me and

A nice little fella about five foot three and by his coat I could see that he’d been in the

Army, and it’d been some time, so I asked him about it and it was on his mind to talk

place for a man to spend his time. But not me I gotta come down here and stand in line at the VA hospital.

Boy I haven’t been able to hold down work , and them bureaucrats, don’t care who they hurt,

I’m staying down on the River with my friend Jim, he’s got a bad liver he’s a drinking

man, and I’m afraid one o these days I’m gonna have to put him in the ground.

In Seattle they’re looking for a liver for Jim but he’s gotta stay off the liquor and its hard on him

With that Jack pulled his coat in tight and smiled and bid me have a good night and

walked off hunched up in his own peculiar way. And I could hear the coming of another

train and hurried off down the track again and that’s the last time I ever saw old Smiling

You see and hear a lot of funny things when you live so close to the railroad trains,

In the Dark of the Night the trains go rumbling down, above the drifters asleep on the

I think about the difference between them and me but the truth is I just can’t see

Lot’s a people took off for the road, stuck in some Limbo like bodiless souls, like the

Go wandering down some endless track, they got to keep going cause they can’t turn back,