Whoa: I found this funky-but-great version of Seamie O’Dowd, Mairtin O’Connor, and Cathal Hayden playing Cedars of Lebanon. They are three of the greatest living folk/trad musicians in Ireland, and tour Europe a lot in this formation.
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22xDMXEo0Dw[/tube]
Cedars Of Lebanon
A long way from Pharoah’s hand,
and a quick step from the Promised Land,
a quick step from Palestine,
and a heart-beat from this heart of mine:
rock-fall at the Wailing Wall,
and the temple-keepers fly
to where Time machines those great, green trees
to a holy timber-land.
I was raised in the shade
of the Cedars of Lebanon,
and I’ve bathed in bay where
sailors burned the sand,
then gave the glass to man
and all his kind;
past the sight of land,
they rode on ships to Spain
for what they’d find.
Big towns, and your hearts are down,
and your eyes burn—your heels get round.
Smoke’s up, and the sky turns brown—
there’s a place you know, where your fancy grounds.
No dreams on silver screens,
they’ve found a place to hide:
the Holy Land of gods and man
is where your spirit flies.
I was raised in the shade
of the Cedars of Lebanon,
and I’ve bathed in bay where
sailors burned the sand,
then gave the glass to man
and all his kind;
past the sight of land,
they rode on ships to Spain
for what they’d find.
1 comments
The song ‘The Cedars of Lebanon’ was written in 1974 in Sligo by the Beirut-raised Thom Moore, at the time a member of the group Pumpkinhead (Mulligan LUN-001, 1975). Seamie can be heard singing it (accompanied by his Unwanted partners Cathy Jordan and Rick Epping) on the O’Connor/Hayden/O’Dowd recording Crossroads, available from them; or in the original Pumpkinhead version on their recording.