Twilight has blanketed old country jail
the prisoners ain't sleeping,
they're silently waiting
and counting the days
till the door is swung wide
and summertime welcomes them home..
Go down you broken old shell of a man
down where the young river rolls
The cage that has sprung you
has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
To keep all our children from going to crime
we'll lock them in schoolrooms and structure their time
and we'll give them their freedom when lessons are learned
so life will not lead them astray..
Go down you broken old shell of a man
down where the young river rolls
The cage that has sprung you
has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
Well the cage that has sprung you has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
the prisoners ain't sleeping,
they're silently waiting
and counting the days
till the door is swung wide
and summertime welcomes them home..
Go down you broken old shell of a man
down where the young river rolls
The cage that has sprung you
has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
To keep all our children from going to crime
we'll lock them in schoolrooms and structure their time
and we'll give them their freedom when lessons are learned
so life will not lead them astray..
Go down you broken old shell of a man
down where the young river rolls
The cage that has sprung you
has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
Well the cage that has sprung you has robbed you of sight
and you are still caught in the night..
Contributed by giorgio - 2010/1/4 - 19:36
Language: English
"In the original I had more verses, but then somehow they didn’t suit and so I deleted them...though I still have the old recording around here somewhere.."
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Album: Tofu Spaghetti [2007]
"I wrote this circa 1970 at the age of 18. It probably had as much to do with education as with the notion in the song that freedom stolen from a prisoner is not automatically returned at the end of the sentence.
I believe I was arguing against the defeatism suffered by some when the struggle for justice is stymied. As Howard Zinn once said, the changes that we effect are not always visible in the context of our own lives, at least not entirely, as the borders of history are wider than that."