He Was My Brother Lyrics
He was my brother
Five years older than I
He was my brother
Twenty-three years old the day he died
[Verse 2]
Freedom rider
They cursed my brother to his face
Go home, outsider
This town's gonna be your buryin' place
[Verse 3]
He was singin' on his knees
An angry mob trailed along
They shot my brother dead
Because he hated what was wrong
[Verse 4]
He was my brother
Tears can't bring him back to me
He, he was my brother
And he died so his brothers could be free
He died so his brothers could be free
About
This song is a dedication to Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman – Three civil rights activists murdered at the hands of a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob on June 21, 1964 near Philadelphia, Mississippi, with Andrew Goodman being their friend and Simon’s classmate at Queens College.
“He Was My Brother” was the first folk song Simon debuted publicly after several months hanging out in the Greenwich Village folk clubs of the early 1960s. As Simon’s biographer Robert Hilton explains,
it came fairly quickly. He knew it was more ambitious and mature than anything he had written previously, though he didn’t kid himself: he also knew “He Was My Brother” was derivative. Instead of mirroring what he heard on the radio, he was now patterning his tunes on what he might hear nightly in Village clubs. It was still a formula, but a step forward. (Paul Simon: A Life, p. 45)
Q&A
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