Dan Fogelberg - Forefathers guitar tab

"Forefathers" - Dan Fogelberg 1990

Intro: alternate D and G/B (x20033 or x20030). You can play around with

those two chords between verses as well...

D Bm

They came from Scandinavia, the land of midnight sun

D Bm

And crossed the North Atlantic when this century was young

G

They'd heard that in America every man was free

A D

To live the way he chose to live and be who he could be

Some of them were farmers there

And tilled the frozen soil

But all they got was poverty

From all their earnest toil

They say one was a sailor

Who sailed the wide world round

Made home port - got drunk one night

Walked off the pier and drowned

(The rest of the verses add two beats in the last lines where the A chord is)

My mother was of Scottish blood

It's there that she was born

They brought her to America in 1924

They left behind the highlands

And the heather-covered hills

And came to find America

With broad, expectant dreams and iron wills

My grandad worked the steel mills

Of central Illinois

His daughter was his jewel

His son was just his boy

For thirty years he worked the mills

And stoked the coke-fed fires

And looked toward the day

When he'd at last be 65 and could retire

F#m

And the sons become the fathers

Bm

And the daughters will be wives

G

As the torch is passed from hand to hand

D A

And we struggle through our lives

F#m

Though the generations wander

Bm A

The lineage survives

G

And all of us from dust to dust

A D G/B D G/B

We all become forefathers by and by

The woman and the man were wed

Just after the war

And they settled in this river town

And three fine sons they bore

One became a lawyer, and one fine pictures drew

And one became this lonely soul who sits here now

And sings this song to you