Harry Chapin (1942 – 1981)
American singer, songwriter, and social activist.
He was dancing to some music
No one else had ever heard
He'd speak in unknown languages
She would translate every word
And then when the world was laughing
At his castles in the sky
She'd hold him in her body
Till he once again could fly.
It was the town that made America famous.
The churches full and the kids all gone to hell.
Six traffic lights and seven cops and all the streets kept clean.
The supermarket and the drug store and the bars all doing well.
You see, I have no real complaints of how you've left your past behind
I guess what gets me worried is you've erased him from your mind.
Remember when the music
Came from wooden boxes strung with silver wire
And as we sang the words, it would set our minds on fire,
For we believed in things, and so we'd sing.
Hello my Country
I once came to tell everyone your story
Your passion was my poetry
And your past my most potent glory
Your promise was my prayer
Your hypocrisy my nightmare
And your problems fill my present
Are we both going somewhere?
He was a young driver,
just out on his second job.
And he was carrying the next day's pasty fruits
for everyone in that coal-scarred city
where children play without despair
in backyard slag-piles and folks manage to eat each day
about thirty thousand pounds of bananas...
The Mayor of Candor lied
When he offered me his only daughter
The Mayor of Candor tried
To take her off across the water
What a thing to do to a young man in love
What a thing to do to your daughter.
Sometimes I get this crazy dream
And I just take off in my car
But you can travel on ten thousand miles
And still stay where you are.
There are lessons to life
That the lovers got to learn
There are corners out there
You know they're waitin' somewhere
And you've got to be prepared to turn
There are callouses that come
That the lovers got to earn
In the years of your youth
You can't be fire proof
You know you've got to get burned.
You see, dream-lover of a lady, what shakes me to the core
Is the thought as you caress me, you've done this all before
I think about the future with me out and others in
Will I, too, have disappeared like I've never ever been?
Oh, if a man tried
To take his time on earth
And prove before he died
What one man's life could be worth,
I wonder what would happen to this world.
Music was his life, it was not his livelihood,
And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul.
He did not know how well he sang; It just made him whole.
All my life's a circle;
Sunrise and sundown;
Moon rolls thru the nighttime;
Till the daybreak comes around.
He looks at the city where no one had known him.
He looks at the sky where no one looks down.
He looks at his life and what it has shown him.
He looks for his shadow it cannot be found.
It took a while, but she looked in the mirror,
And she glanced at the license for my name.
A smile seemed to come to her slowly,
It was a sad smile, just the same.
And she said, "How are you Harry?"
I said, "How are you Sue?
Through the too many miles
and the too little smiles
I still remember you."
This commitment to end world hunger, and my music and story songs, are ways of dealing with the world as I see it. I'm playing 200 concerts per year-- half of them benefits-- all of them attempts at getting across the footlights to people I would enjoy spending time with in non-concert situations. And over the past 4 years of musical fun, millions of dollars have been raised for things I believe in. Telling stories of our time, building a lasting body of work, new songs, new records, new audiences, new challenges, and still that painfully exciting process of growth that can make one's life into a richly woven tapestry.
There's a vacancy, won't you come to me
And fill my empty spaces
I'm a motel man in a promised land
That's filled with empty faces
So won't you bring your sorrows bring your dreams,
It's a place for you to be
There's no more tomorrow or that's how it seems
Won't you come to me? I've got a vacancy
I'm in the Dance Band on the Titanic
Singing "Nearer my God to thee"
and the icebergs on the starboard bow
Won't you dance with me?
And it shamed me into silence, as quietly she said,
"If you want me to come with you, then that's all right with me.
Cause I know I'm going nowhere, and anywhere's a better place to be.
Anywhere's a better place to be."
And if a woman
She used a life line
As something more than
Some man's servant mother wife time
Well I wonder what would happen to this world.