Hot Asphalt

(Ewan McColl)

Good evening all my jolly lads, I’m glad to see you well
if you’ll gather all around me now a story I can tell
for I’ve got a situation and it‘s a damn fine job
I can whisper I’ve the weekly wage of nineteen bob.
‘tis twelve months come October since I left my native home
after helping in Killarney, boys, to bring the harvest down
but now I wear a guernsey and around me waist a belt
I’m the gaffer of the squad that makes the boiling hot asphalt

We laid it in the hollows and we laid it in the flat
and if it doesn‘t last forever j.c. I’ll eat my hat
I have wandered up and down this world sure I’ve never felt
any surface that was equal to the boiling hot asphalt

Well the other night a copper comes and he says to me „McGuire,
will you kindly let me light my pipe down at your boiler fire?“
and he planks himself right down in front, with hobnails up, till late,
and says I „my decent man, you‘d better go and mind your bait“
he ups and yells, „I’m down on you, I’m up to all yer pranks,
don‘t I know you for a traitor from the Tipperary ranks?“
boys, I  hit straight from the shoulder and gave him such a belt,
that I knocked him into the boiler full of hot asphalt.

We quickly dragged him out again and we threw him in the tub,
and with soap and heated water we began to rub and scrub,
but devil the thing, it hardened and it turned him hard as stone
and with every other scrape you could hear the copper groan.
“I’m thinking“ says O‘Reilly, „that he‘s lookin‘ like old Nick,
and burn me if I’m not inclined to claim him with my pick“
“no“ says I, „it would be easier to boil him till he melts,
and to roll him nice and easy in the boiling hot asphalt.“

You may talk about yer sailors, ballad-singers and the rest,
your shoemakers your tailors but we please the ladies best.
the only ones who know the way their flinty hearts to melt
are the boys around the boiler mixing boiling hot asphalt.
With rubbing and scrubbing sure I caught me death of cold,
and for scientific purposes my body has been sold,
to the Kelvingrove museum me lads, I’m hangin‘ in my pelt,
as a monument to the irish mixing boiling hot asphalt.