50 Days, 50 Songs to the "50 Years on the Carefree Highway" Concert

Day 33


One of Gordon Lightfoot’s “story songs,” from his Cold on the Shoulder album. Like many folk songs, it deals with injustice and prejudice and how one small boy survives tragedy.

His father was a man who could never understand

The shame on a red man’s face

So they lived in the hills and they never came down

But to trade in the white man’s place

Early in the spring when the snow had disappeared

They came down with a bag of skins

In the fall of the year of 1910

Daddy died by the rope down in Cherokee Bend

Cherokee Bend, Gordon Lightfoot