Though it was something of a challenge over beers during a raw oyster eating session - aka "deexpectoration" - I do find myself wanting to learn a few more songs to do wrong to on the guitar. Here are the lyrics - perhaps familiar to some of you - to my first choice:
When I was a kid, I found a robin's egg and hid itIt's by Bob Snider, a good son or at least cousin of the Annapolis Valley whose path to semi-CBC-stardom was pretty rough or at least rustic. Buy his music.
On a timber in an old abandoned shack
That was sitting in a field full of raspberry bushes
With a crab apple tree around the back
And a stream going by at the bottom of a hill
With a rock in the middle, and if you sat still
You could see the minnow swim, and from an overhanging limb
You could listen to the heat bugs trill.And early every day all my friends and I would play
Digging holes and finding gold among the rocks
And looking for salamanders, and eating all the berries,
And rolling down the hill in a box.
Until one day they came with their machinery
And dozed down the shack and hacked up the greenery
And stuffed the stream into a concrete pipe
and levelled the hill away.
Then they built a couple of mounds, just to make it look round,
And brought in loads of sod.And they planted a row of trees, that came up to our knees
Without a speck of shade it looked so odd.
And there were no more dragonflies and no cray-fishin',
They called it a parkette after a politician,
And put up a sign saying "No Ball Playing,"
And nobody ever went there anymore.

Comments
Brother Iain - August 5, 2003 1:14 PM
Bob Snider has been known to busk (yes, BUSK) in my insufferably trendy Toronto neighbourhood ... though, come to think of it, I haven't seen him out there this summer.