Billy Bragg - Remember The Mountain Bed lyrics

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:

Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:

You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs,

You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine

Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled woodvines twine

Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see

I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky,

As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber did you lie:

Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air

Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there.

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they

As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away:

The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below

Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go.

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned

Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned

There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why

The People laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die.

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown,

Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown

Your shape and form is dim, but plain, there on our mountain bed

I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams,

To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas

I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land

And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears,

I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here:

My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain

Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night

My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:

My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain

Back to the breasts of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

WORDS: Woody Guthrie (1944) -

MUSIC: Jeff Tweedy/Jay Bennett (1999)

LEROY BACH: piano

JAY BENNETT: organ, nylon-string guitar, backing vocal

KEN COOMER: drums

JOHN STIRRATT: bass, backing vocal

JEFF TWEEDY: vocal, acoustic guitar