Emmylou Harris Songs - Bang The Drum Slowly Lyrics

Emmylou Harris - Bang The Drum Slowly

Emmylou Harris - Bang The Drum Slowly Lyrics and Youtube Music Videos

Album: Red Dirt Girl
Released: 2000

Bang The Drum Slowly Lyrics

I meant to ask you how to fix that car
I always meant to ask you about the war
And what you saw across a bridge too far
Did it leave a scar

Or how you navigated wings of fire and steel
Up where heaven had no more secrets to conceal
And still you found the ground beneath your wheels
How did it feel

Bang The Drum Slowly play the pipe lowly
To dust be returning from dust we begin
Bang the drum slowly I'll speak of things holy
Above and below me world without end

I meant to ask you how when everything seemed lost
And your fate was in a game of dice they tossed
There was still that line that you would never cross
At any cost

I meant to ask you how you lived what you believed
With nothing but your heart up your sleeve
And if you ever really were deceived
By the likes of me

Bang the drum slowly play the pipe lowly
To dust be returning from dust we begin
Bang the drum slowly I'll speak of things holy
Above and below me world without end

Gone now is the day and gone the sun
There is peace tonight all over Arlington
But the songs of my life will still be sung
By the light of the moon you hung

I meant to ask you how to plow that field
I meant to bring you water from the well
And be the one beside you when you fell
Could you tell

Bang the drum slowly play the pipe lowly
To dust be returning from dust we begin
Bang the drum slowly I'll speak of things holy
Above and below me world without end

Writer/s: Clark, Guy / Harris, Emmylou
Publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group
Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind

Bang The Drum Slowly

Guy Clark helped Emmylou Harris write this elegy for her father, who died in 1993. She told American Songwriter magazine: "You would think something like that is so important that you should write about it. I had a great level of difficulty dealing with something so close to home. It took me a while to get some distance … My dad, he worked on cars… there were so many things I could have learned from him but I was too busy being an artist. Sometimes, [with writing] you just forget: you think it has to come from above when it actually just comes from your heart."

"Guy Clark said we should write the song, because he knew my dad," Emmylou added. "When my parents would come to visit, I would always have Guy and Susanna over. Guy really appreciated that my father flew Corsair jets, and also how grounded he was, with the way he could make coffee and such. You know how Guy is, he can see people in a frame. And I felt that he could pull that out of me."

"So we worked on that song one day and then we would phone each other," she continued. "He once said, 'Is your father buried in Arlington?' I said 'no' and then he said, 'That's such a great word.' So that is one thing in the song that is in a sense not true."