When I Was a Cowboy Lyrics & Tabs by The Deadly Gentlemen
When I Was a Cowboy
guitar chords lyrics
A blue sky blackened and broke open,
All without even a bit of warning,
And a bad time came on,
A fifteen day long downpour storming.
I took a look at the wrack of my home,
All sunken on the day that flood quit,
I didn't waste to grieve I took a ride that evening,
And never looked back at that mud pit.
I live to tell my tale, whether apocryphal or proper,
I took off onward from the nighttime dawnward,
With nothing but a pocketful of copper,
I neither did care nor wonder what plunder,
Fortune or decay would the West hold,
Day by day so rugged I made my way,
From pitiful city to pesthole.
Fortune or decay would the West hold,
Day by day so rugged I made my way,
From pitiful city to pesthole.
All that while over the wide open mile,
The germ of the man that I am festered,
Through skies so boundless with trouble all around us,
I followed the wallow of that corruption westward.
Every day I died in that saddle,
Riding till I felt the fiber of my flesh turn pain,
Through wood through dale downriver and over trail,
I made it to the western plain,
Land of the rotten and good, the clay pot and cottonwood,
I made it but I can't say how, boy,
I lived by a bludgeon but nobody was judging,
Back then when I was a cowboy.
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Even today I can still see that drinkery filthy,
Wormwood bubbling up in the dramglass,
It flooded my brain so damn fast,
In a second I reckon it hit me like a sandblast.
Saw damnation clear as daybreak,
In a vision that I had in my head then.
I walked on fire, choking on smoke,
In the wicked valley of the shadow of the dead men,
Just like a foundling in a wild surrounding,
Looking at a world so brutal and beastly,
The way that it gripped my brain that vision,
Did it really ever release me?
It was that day then when I knew through the darkness,
Every bit of the good in me was gone sir,
I strode down deeper into the bowel of the valley,
Where even the most vile unreckonable monster,
Looking at me through bright red eyes so mightily,
Wailed, turned tail from the sight of me.
For the half day I treaded that pathway,
Looking on sights so rank and unseemly,
Saw no light and didn't care didn't frighten,
I knew then nothing would ever redeem me.
Hellfire faded and died the sky broke up,
Bedraggled and ragged in daybroken open I woke up,
Knowing in my core no mortal nor war,
Nothing could destroy me, hinder me, harm me,
Fearless, and with a newfound clearness,
I scrabbled up in the saddle and rode like an army.
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
Come on cow, come a cow cow yippee ay yay
On a strange and ancient saltscape,
At the foot of a land of sand and shale,
My solitary form is traveling up along a lonesome and abandoned trail.
But I saw then distant skyline riders,
All blurred by the heat rays,
Out of a long gone bloodland now they appeared here,
Ravenous half-savage and meat-crazed,
I tried to out run them but I knew I was done when I turned,
To a sight to terrorize,
Two men wicked and cruel, painted in wicked gruel,
Rapidly riding upon me pairwise.
When that first rider drew near,
I levered a pistol ball all ready to cap it
And from my pocket I drew that weapon,
Leveled at that rider rapid and fired.
With the rigor of the trigger lingering in my finger,
Ring of smoke moldering into thin air,
I looked at that empty saddle,
Voided of the rider who had been there.
But I heard nor saw no man nor bits of blown blown shardwise scattering,
I saw no body no man no blood,
And toward me that horse was clattering.
I looked on yonder frightened to ponder,
Strange and unnatural forces,
And I did not see nor hear both men,
Running around behind me horseless.
With a blow to the back I toppled,
And tumbling down that hot rock hill I snowballed,
With a warlike holler both of the men followed,
Quickening in a flash of cobalt.
The two drew near and I knew my doom,
I felt my heartbeat slackening,
But lying on my back,
I saw in the sun,
The coming of a strange, blackened ring,
I drew my boot blade against those two
In the second it took them to look up at that black sun,
I killed the couple of them graveyard dead,
But I swear it gave no satisfaction.
