A slice of the past in song

When I moved from Chicago to San Francisco in the mid-1970s, I brought along a banjo purchased on a whim at a Wabash Avenue pawn shop. I learned a few licks on the five-stringed beauty, but after I bought a piano on time, $17 per month for three years, I didn’t play the banjo again. I eventually gave it away.

A song I wrote during that time was more aspiration than reality, but that’s the beauty of art. It captures moments, dreams, imagined lives, not all that comes to pass. Here are the lyrics:

Artist by the Bay

In San Francisco I’ll wear a beret
Sip cappuccino inside a cafe all day
I’m gonna be an artist by the ba

I’ll take a book and a banjo to play
To all the people I meet on the way I will say
I’m gonna be an artist by the bay

I’ll have a sunny room with plants in every window
There’ll be no place for gloom
Bye bye, baby

So by the water is where I will stay
Singin’ for quarters I’ll earn my own way every day
I’m gonna be an artist by the bay
I’m gonna be an artist by the bay

(c) 1977 Laura McHale Holland

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