submissions
| Al Stewart – Roads to Moscow Lyrics
| 3 years ago
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@[TDK:41115] Stewart read dozens of books to research this song, and while it\'s not up on his site anymore, he used to have about ten pages of notes on this song alone, including this part:\r\n\r\n"And now they ask me of the time I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner ..."\r\n\r\nThe Germans viewed captured Russians as slave labor, and they were treated very poorly. As German labor became scarce, they were forced to work in armament factories and mines.\r\n\r\nSome 5,750,000 Russians were taken prisoner during the war. Barely 1 million were found alive at the end. Two million died in captivity from starvation, exposure and disease. A million were released during the war, some of them to serve in collaborator units set up by the German Army. Another million were never accounted for. According to the Germans 67,000 were executed, although it is believed that the actual number is far higher.\r\n\r\n"They only held me for a day, a lucky break I say ...."\r\n\r\nRussian prisoners of war who managed to escape their captors really did not fare much better. Fearing these men had been co-opted, Stalin ordered that they all be sent into a sort of internal exile in Siberia.\r\n\r\nAlso, Mark Stoler, on his blog Things Have Changed, has a full take on this song, including this:\r\n\r\nIn his epic account of the German-Soviet war, Absolute War, Chris Bellamy writes that "the Red Army was the only one in the world where being taken prisoner counted as desertion and treason". Stalin believed any soldier who allowed himself to be captured was a traitor and counter-revolutionary and that Russians exposed to Westerners for any length of time became a danger to the Soviet state, because they were potentially infected with subversive views. Bellamy adds: "The Soviet government and military command had absolutely no interest in what happened to Soviet people in German captivity. When prisoners of war who survived were released the end of the war, they were usually sent to the Gulag or shot, and the same fate even befell many who had fought and crawled their way out of German encirclements during the war." |
submissions
| Alison Krauss – Away Down the River Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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This beautiful song is sung from the point of view of one who's just recently died and speaking to one left behind. The one speaking could be a parent, a lover, a child, or even a pet - the song is left open that way, so it can be comforting to any who've lost a loved one. It also reminds me of that poem "Crossing the Bar."
Krauss has an excellent ear for great songs, and this one was written by Julie Lee. |
submissions
| Van Morrison – Who Was That Masked Man Lyrics
| 12 years ago
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To understand this song you have to listen to the song that precedes it on the album, "Linden Arden Stole The Highlights," which flows into this one.
The last line of that song is "Now he's livin', livin' with a gun." |
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