Cold Montana Morn

In our now defunct band, The Montana Logging and Ballet Company, Steve Garnaas-Holmes wrote almost all the songs, and they were spectacular ones. Tim Holmes wrote a few good ones as well, while Bob FitzGerald and I wrote only a small handful of tunes not performed in our show.

Recently I was musing about missing out because I couldn’t do Steve-style songs like the pop-folk-jazz-gospel-rock-humorous-satirical ones that he did. Maybe my “talent” would have been more suited to writing country music, despite never having played or sung a country song. I say that only because I know nothing about it. So, on a bleak snowy morning not long ago, I tried my first lyrics for that genre.

Cold Montana Morn
lyrics by Rusty Harper
The temperature was falling and the snow was blowing sideways,
The woman on the TV said they’re closing all the highways.
Your momma said, “Let’s call in sick” — and that’s why you were born.
You were conceived in love on a cold Montana morn.

We didn’t stop to think about the world that you would live in,
The meanness, all the hate and fear they use to make us give in,
The greed of wealthy people who must always get their way.
Good thing that love, not fear, won out and you are here today.

The rich are grabbing all they can, we hear from all reports,
They bought the president and Congress, and they bought the courts.
They trash the jobs and close the plants, like humans do not matter.
The bottom line is this: the fat cats all are getter fatter.

They buy up land and rivers, jobs, trophy wives and power,
They justify it with big lies that they change by the hour.
But you have always known the truth: the reason you were born
Is, despite their wealth, they do not own the cold Montana morn.
They’ll never own you, launched in love on a cold Montana morn.

Well, there it is. I can see that Garth Brooks isn’t going to call, so I’ll get back to mucking out the corrals, metaphorically speaking.

About admin

Rusty Harper is outrageously happy because he is retired and living with the love of his life, Pat Callbeck Harper in Helena, Montana. So why does he inflict these ramblings on the rest of us, you ask? Because you deserve it. If you aren't smart enough not to read this stuff, then you have to suffer through it. Maybe that builds character, though I doubt it. Think of all the positive things you could do with the time you are wasting on things that occur to me in the night and then sound strange even to me when I write them down in the morning. Bake a cake. Complain to your Senator. Run for Congress. Do something.
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