Sailor of the Century

This is a song Knees wrote back in 1977 but never played - until 1992 or so when it was recorded in Shreveport along with most of his other songs at his Olive Street house. It's a science-fiction song about a dystopian future when some tectonic upheaval has caused the middle of North America to become an ocean. Believe it or not, Knees was sitting at the piano one day and played a lick and sang a gibberish line, "From the Colorado Islands to the shores of Tennessee..." The line surprised him with its pregnancy and the rest of the song just flowed out.

SAILOR OF THE CENTURY

The 1993 version is already in this blog, back in June 2012. This new version has almost the same arrangement.


I’ve been a sailor for the past seven years
Sailin on the ocean of our country
I’ve seen the teachers, the preachers of fear
Who kept me from the woman who loved me

In the third year of the flood
We met at Mt Rainier
Where we helped build
The village of the mountain
We lived each others lives
Through the hunger and the tears
An drank the love that flowed like a fountain.

Now I’m known as the sailor of the century
The man who cheats the forces from above
From the Colorado Islands
To the shores of Tennessee
I’ll sail the American Ocean till I find my love

Then the teachers walked among us
And told us of the sea
That lay to the east of the desert
They told us there were places
Where people still were free
Where the teachers had control of the weather

She told me there would never
Be another in her life
But she had to see what happened to the east
Before she left we married
In the Night of the Knife
When I became a killer of the beast.

Now I’m known as the sailor of the century
The man who cheats the forces from above
From the Colorado Islands
To the shores of Tennessee
I’ll sail the American Ocean till I find my love

I’ve been everywhere that there’s left to be
And my lady may not want me when I find her
But my life has not been empty
As I sailed across the sea
I’m not just the man she left behind her.

Now I’m known as the sailor of the century
The man who cheats the forces from above
From the Colorado Islands
To the shores of Tennessee
I’ll sail the American Ocean till I find my love