Blue Wing

He had a blue wing tattooed on his shoulder

Or it might have been a bluebird, I don't know

But he'd get stone drunk and talk about Alaska

The salmon boats and forty-five below

He said he got his blue wing up in Walla Walla

And his cellmate there was Little Willie John

Now, Willie he was once a great blues singer

And Blue Wing and Willie wrote him up a song

They said : "It's dark in here

I can't see the sky

But I look at my blue wing and I close my eyes

And I fly away, beyond these walls

Up above the clouds, where the rain don't fall

On a poor man's dream"

They paroled Blue Wing in August of 1963

And he moved north, picking apples to the town of Wenatchee

And when winter finally caught him, he's in a rundown trailer park

On the south side of Seattle where the days get grey and dark

And he drank and he dreamt a vision of when the salmon still ran free

And his father's fathers crossed that wild old Bering sea

And the land belonged to everyone, and there were old songs yet to sing

Now, it's narrowed down to a cheap hotel and a tattooed prison wing

He said : "It's dark in here

I can't see the sky

But I look at my blue wing and I close my eyes

And I fly away, beyond these walls

Up above the clouds, where the rain don't fall

On a poor man's dream"

Well he drank his way to L.A., and that's where he died

And there was no one that knew his Christian name

And there was no one there to cry

But I dreamed there was a funeral, a preacher and a cheap pine box

And halfway through the sermon, old Blue Wing he began to talk

He said : "It's dark in here

Can't see the sky

But I look at my blue wing and I close my eyes

And I fly away, beyond these walls

Up above the clouds, where the rain don't fall

On a poor man's dream

On a poor man's dream

On a poor man's dream"