Take me away ©Brian Hooper, July 2009
Take me away, where the troubles of this day are far behind
And the promise of tomorrow is joy and peace of mind;
Sing me a song that will take me away.
I love to sing that chorus all about the farmer’s boy,
I love to The Nightingale, it’s rude, but oh so coy,
And when the girls of Old Maui start shouting “ship ahoy”
Then worries have to wait until the morning. Take me away....
Sing to me a protest song, I’ll probably join in,
A song about injustice, or the poor who never win,
But all the while there’s protest, the wheel is still in spin,
And the world may be much better in the morning. Take me away...
And you can sing a blues song all about your troubled life,
The hard times you’ve been having with your drinking or your wife;
I’ll listen while you sing to me of all your pain and strife,
And mine will have to wait until the morning. Take me away......
Now hark, the pipes are calling from across some shady glen,
And Jones’s Ale was new once, but we can’t remember when,
And the hard times of old England are coming round again,
But we’ll leave them in their song until the morning. Take me away....
I was trying to write a song about the oneness of all things, and eventually gave up; it was probably just too heavy a subject. Immediately, this song just came to me.
I don’t usually like the kind of song that praises its own genre. There are loads of them, such as “Sweet Soul Music” and so on, and a fair few in the folk repertoire. This song comes close to that, but I hope it’s a bit more specific, in praise of folk songs as a form of escapism (despite a lot of mine being firmly rooted in the real world).
Of course it will make very little sense to people who aren’t familiar with the songs you’ll hear in folk clubs!