SWING LOW CHARIOT, COME DOWN EASY, TAXI TO THE TERMINAL DOOR
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Artist:
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Album:The Anthology
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Track:*Promised Land.
Rock's one true Poet Laureate at his best.This amazing song alone would have fixed **Chuck Berry's** place in both the Rock n Roll canon and the Great American Songbook.And he paints us a clear picture of a time gone by, before the country was criss-crossed by superhighways and bombarded by the angry screech of the mass media,This was a time of back roads and small towns. A time when magical big cities beckoned, impossibly far away. A time when a cross country trip was an adventure, not a bore.And he does all this in the personna of the Po' boy on the line, in the natural easy cadence of every day speech, yet it scans so well. The mellifluous flow, the way the rhytmic patterns of the words, interlocking and playing off each other, serve to accentuate the storyline.I've heard so many people do this song, from the Dead, to The Band, and so many others. And they're all good, you realy can't kill this song, But Chuck's is my favorite by three lightyears and a football field. His reading has that bemused, wry Berry humor, that wide-eyed yet world weary perspective of a poet.
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