Johnny is the eternal soldier in the folk music tradition. Johnny goes marching home again to our hurrahs. John is a son, tall and thin, with a leg for every limb, who loses his legs to a cannonball. Johnny comes back an armless, boneless, chickenless egg, and poor Johnny, we hardly knew ya. In every war, Johnny gets his gun, and Johnny comes marching home.
I wrote Johnny Come Home in 2013- 12 years into the American occupation of Afghanistan and 8 years before it would end. The song isn't a finger-pointer; at least not at the troops. Afghanistan and Iraq are my generation's Vietnam, though in Vietnam the troops were largely conscripts and here were volunteers- though many caught in the poverty draft, the wave of angry patriotism after 9/11, the lies and promises of the recruiters. The song is about weariness, about losing hope and faith in an endless war, and no longer trusting the commanders and their plans. It is a song about futility.
I follow the ballad with a performance of Turlough O'Carolan's Sí Beag, Sí Mór, an air about a war between the fey who live on a small hill and those on a larger hill.
lyrics
D G D
Now Johnny old friend, you ain’t wrote in too long
D A D; A
Or if you did, nothing from you’d come through
D G D
Did you get the last package the boys and I sent
D A D; A
To you and the rest of your crew?
A G D
By Christ you and I weren’t yet middle school boys
D G A
Back when the long war began
D G D
Now Johnny come home from the Hindu Kush
D A D; G A
And the red hills of Afghanistan
I remember the day when you first flew away
How you looked like a prince among men
And the lines round your eyes in the time you came back
Before you get called up again
And we watched you all fly off into the sky
To the pride and the pomp of the band
Now Johnny, come home from the Hindu Kush
And the red hills of Afghanistan
The generals say that it’s all going well
Train the locals to fight once you’re gone
But ain’t it the same they were saying back then
When your dad took the boat from Saigon?
Still the papers all say you’ll be out any day
If it all goes according to plan
Now Johnny, come home from the Hindu Kush
And the red hills of Afghanistan
And the dust and the rock tumble under your boots
Where the Britons and the Russians have bled
And echo the walls of the Khyber pass
That we’ve marked with our living and dead
Since Eliphston’s army fell at Gandamak
They’ve been held to by no foreign hand
So Johnny come home from the Hindu Kush
And the red hills of Afghanistan
(optional verse, omitted in recording)
It’s a deadly Great Game that nobody wins
And the pieces are blood, tears, and bones
And the people here left, to harvest the storm
From the wind that the players had sown
Half a century of war, and how many more,
Could anyone ask them to stand?
Johnny come home, from the Hindu Kush
And the red hills of Afghanistan
Now the spring has come in, and the girls are out,
And they’re taking the nights on the town
But we can’t have a song and we can’t raise a glass
without our boy Johnny around
It’s too long you’ve wandered around Salang and Spin Gar
And the long road around Lataband
So Johnny come home from the Kindu Kush
And the red hills of Afghanistan
Emmett is a working class rebel musician- a union carpenter, former river deckhand, raised on a farm in central Minnesota.
With American country and blues and Irish traditional roots, he keeps the Long Memory going while singing about today's struggles. His work is rooted in social movements he's an active part of, from labor to defending the earth to fighting hate....more
Bright and skipping songs that foreground the sound of the banjo and fingerstyle guitar in music that feels timeless. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 5, 2020
This album speaks to the continuum of African diasporic culture that is central to the vibrant canon of Americana folk music. Bandcamp Album of the Day May 29, 2020
