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The seagulls are calling, and the wind is in the sails,
And she's fast moving over the sea;
On a ship bound for St. John's three thousand miles away,
A human cargo my comrades and me.
Farewell my green valleys, God keep you the same,
If in only my mind you'll be;
I'm sailing dark water to far America,
Never more my green valley I'll see.
It hurts me to think of the things I left behind,
And the famine has blackened our land;
And to look now for something that I might never find,
Is a problem that now is at hand.
Farewell my green valleys, God keep you the same,
If in only my mind you'll be;
I'm sailing dark water to far America,
Never more my green valley I'll see.
There's a fever a-raging, and the wind has died away,
And the journey can no longer be;
And the plague is a shadow that lingers night and day,
For more thoughts of green valleys I'll see.
Farewell my green valleys, God keep you the same,
If in only my mind you'll be;
I'm sailing dark water to far America,
Never more my green valley I'll see.
Farewell my green valleys, God keep you the same,
If in only my mind you'll be;
I'm sailing dark water to far America,
Never more my green valley I'll see.
Note: Winner of the 1992 Stan Rogers Golden Quill Award: One of our unsung heroes, Reid has had everything go wrong that could go wrong in his brief career in the music business. From his appearances on Singalong Jubilee, his songs covered by the Wolftones and the Irish Rovers, his solo album Hard Rock Miner to the bottom of the heap. Well, he's back and still writing fantastic songs.
A variant was arranged and recorded as Green Valleys by Fine Crowd (Poverty's Arse, trk#3, 1995, produced and engineered at Piperstock Productions, Torbay, NL, by Dermot O'Reilly).
