> Eliza Carthy > Songs > King James Version

King James Version

[Billy Bragg]

Billy Bragg sang his own song King James Version in September 1996 on his CD William Bloke

Eliza Carthy and the Ratcatchers sang King James Version in 2005 on her CD Rough Music. She commented in the CD booklet:

Greg Stephens is one of those musicians that makes other people’s lives fuller. I have admired him for a long time. He gave this 3/2 tune to my mother with other tunes from the North West of England in 1975.

You find a lot of the time signature of 3/2 in the North of England and it is enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment as more and more people are playing English music. You don’t need three legs to dance to it, as I’ve misleadingly said in the past.

This is a video of Eliza Carthy and the Ratcatchers performing King James Version at Buxton Opera House in 2007:

Lyrics

He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in.
She says, “I’m a teacher here, I teach the children.”
And he wondered to himself then of all the things he could learn from her.
A great mighty wonder.

I think of the names you once called me in anger,
I remember the sadness in Florence Ballard’s eyes.
Imagine all the melancholy you could find in the arms of a stranger.
Come, come all ye faithful.

Seems like nothing goes right
For the world that we were born in,
But the horizon is bright
Because yonder comes the morning.

Upstairs they’re buying a stairway to heaven
And down here in the garden we’re changing sticks into snakes.
And the jangle of religious medals would put the fear of God into angels,
Bread, bread of heaven.

It looks like a shift to the right
For the world that we were born in,
Oh but the horizon is bright
Because yonder comes the morning.