Name: Brooklyn Bridge
Channel: Fred Stanton
Description: "Brooklyn Bridge" is a song by Fred Stanton. How the Brooklyn Bridge was built, and the continuing march across it.

Brooklyn Bridge

Fred Stanton

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How the Brooklyn Bridge was built, and the continuing march across it.

Fred Stanton

Political/personal songs since the 1960s -- killer ballads, working-class anthems, political satire. Fred's twelve-string guitar can be anything from a blues ba

Fred Stanton’s songs (along with his lumberjack voice and jumbo 12-string guitar) embody the political folk-singing tradition. Fred has been an industrial worker (a welder of oilfield equipment; an electronic assembler; and a railroad electrician, hostler and brakeperson) as well as a political organizer and union activist. This life is at the heart of his songsmoving, personal ballads, rollicking satires, and working-class anthems. Fred has been singing in concerts, union rallies and political protests since the 1960s. His union songs celebrate the struggles of strikers at Peabody Coal, poultry processing workers in North Carolina, and strawberry pickers in California. And his "Singing Cars," a Bronx salute to car alarms, has been featured on NPR’s "Car Talk" show. Newest songs include “Five-Dollar Coal,” which is the story of miners in Utah fighting for a union.

Song Info

Genre

Acoustic • Acoustic Folk

Charts

Peak #210

Peak in subgenre #46

Author

Fred Stanton

Rights

Uploaded

April 16, 2004

Track Files

MP3

MP3 3.3 MB • 128 kbps • 0:00

Lyrics

Brooklyn Bridge

When a bridge begins, it’s just a dream, 
Imagination’s rainbow arching across a stream. 
But to sink a foundation 
   in the river’s rock and sand 
Takes more than a vision, 
   it takes strong arms and hands.

Chorus: 	
And these great cables vibrate with their songs.
We will remember them as we march on.

These graceful towers rest on their bones—
Sandhogs and divers, brothers of Davey Jones, 
Rising from the caissons, 
   nitrogen bubbles in their veins, 
To live as cripples, 
   or to die in awful pain. (Chorus)

They came to Brooklyn from everywhere, 
Refugees from famine, dictatorship, despair, 
To work the rigging, no nets to break their fall, 
Crushed and forgotten 
   they’re only workers, after all. 

How many lovers, how many fathers, 
How many voices? Nobody knows. 
Company ledgers count only the dollars. 
The hired hands, it’s easy come, easy go.

This bridge is swaying beneath our feet. 
A cry for justice over a reggae beat. 
Each generation learns a lesson from the last, 
Reaching for the future 
   from the bridges of the past. (Chorus)

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