Paul Metsers - 'Farewell to the Gold' - the original video free download

Taken from the Workshop Sessions live recordings, this is Paul Metsers' best known song: it has been covered by Bob Dylan, Nic Jones and countless others. Here, for the first time on video, is Paul singing the haunting 'Farewell to the Gold'.

Please visit http://www.paulmetsers.com/Biography.html for more information about Paul, to listen to clips and purchase his albums.

Farewell to the Gold

published by Topic Records Ltd

Shotover river, your gold it is waning

It's weeks since the colour I've seen

But it's no use just sitting and Lady Luck blaming

So I'll pack up and make the break clean

Chorus:

Farewell to the gold that never I found

Goodbye to the nuggets that somewhere abound

For it's only when dreaming that I see you gleaming

Down in the dark, deep underground

It's nearly two years since I left my old mother

For adventure and gold by the pound

With Jimmy the prospector - he was another

For the hills of Otago was bound -chorus-

We worked the Cardrona's dry valley all over

Old Jimmy Williams and me

But they were panning good dirt on the winding Shotover

So we headed down there just to see -chorus-

We sluiced and we cradled for day after day

Making hardly enough to get by

Til a terrible flood swept poor Jimmy away

During six stormy days in July -chorus-

Paul says: "I think the inspiration for this song, which I probably wrote in 1968, came from when, as a teacher, I took my music class on a trip down the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Part of our adventure included a day on one of the old gold digging sites, where we all panned for, and found, small flecks of the alluvial treasure. Our bus took us down the steep road from high Cardrona to the Shotover River, now known for its excellent whitewater canoeing, where many of the strikes during NZ's goldrush era were found. The chorus of the song haunted me until I found a story to accompany it - the account of a flash flood which, in July, 1863, claimed the lives of hundreds of goldminers. The old prospector and the young hopeful, who teams up with him and survives to tell the tale, are fictitious. The Shotover and Cardrona valleys are both in the South Island's rugged and beautiful Central Otago."