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Built to Last
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From the CD Built to Last. A song about the Welsh Marches - the border land of Wales and England where I was born and have spent much of my life.
root chords deportees graham bellinger
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Acoustic rock n roll, blues, country and folk. Songs sung like they matter.
Welcome to my page. It will contain my own recordings of my own songs. There will also be some recordings with my old partners, Steve Goodchild (who now lives in Canada) and the Deacons - we were a popular West Midlands folk group in the 1980s and still get together once in a very blue moon. I am based in Chester UK and play every week in the city at Alexanders as well as other gigs around the area. For recordings by my current bands 'Root Chords' and 'Deportees' please go to www.soundclick.com/rootchords or for more information about me or the bands go to our website www.grahambellinger.jimdo.com, www.deportees.jimdo.com and www.rootchords.jimdo.com Hope you enjoy something you find here - do let me know.
Song Info
Genre
Acoustic • Acoustic Folk
Charts
Peak #564
Peak in subgenre #57
Author
Graham Bellinger
Rights
Graham Bellinger.
Uploaded
September 12, 2005
Track Files
MP3
MP3 4.3 MB • 128 kbps • 0:00
Story behind the song
Written in autumn 2001 as the album took shape and thinking about the Offa's Dyke path which runs for 173 exhausting miles between Chepstow and Prestatyn through the Welsh border country. It certainly doesn't end at Chester as the song suggests, but my walks on parts of the path always do end there - in a comfortable armchair or a hot bath. The landscape along the way is largely one of huge open country, apparently unspoiled and largely empty, but in fact every inch of it has been shaped by man's actions and dramatic history. It is at the heart of all the songs on the Built to Last CD - I thank goodness I live close to it.
Lyrics
BUILT TO LAST From the Mersey and the Dee To where the Severn meets the sea I take this path each time I roam And it always brings me home This path it rises up to meet me Then like a switchback slips beneath me It soaks my skin but dries my tongue Blowing fit to burst my lungs This path it leaps, this path it falls From Sedbury cliffs to Chester walls No matter where I stop or start I seem to find more my heart The path marks the old divide Where armies clashed and outlaws ride A no mans land of windy hills Where war cries echo still Now ivied walls and ruined keep Shadow the grass beneath my feet The summer field where I lay down A broken army’s burial ground The borderland is now at rest It joins the Marches east and west But still the past is close at hand And written on the land It stretches under ragged skies Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes It speaks to me of all it’s seen Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been The land now bears new scars of time Empty farms and long closed mines Boarded shops, no schools, no trains But still this land remains And as it reaches North and South Wirral sands to Severn mouth It bears the change and weathers storm Like the path it carries on I take this path and still it runs After this hill another one Toward the future and from its past This land was built to last It stretches under ragged skies Fills my heart, my mind, my eyes It speaks to me of all it’s seen Of where we’re bound and where we’ve been
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