Lyrics to
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

This version of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat was released by Joni Mitchell in 1979.

Visit the Joni Mitchell Lyrics profile at Decade Lyrics - it has the Goodbye Pork Pie Hat lyrics as well as the rest of the songs by Joni Mitchell.

Here's more interesting things in songs and lyrics tied to Joni Mitchell or about the 1970s in general.

When Charlie speaks of Lester
You know someone great has gone
The sweetest swinging music man
Had a Porkie Pig hat on
A bright star
In a dark age
When the bandstands had a thousand ways
Of refusing a black man admission
Black musician
In those days they put him in an
Underdog position
Cellars and chittlins’

When Lester took him a wife
Arm and arm went black and white
And some saw red
And drove them from their hotel bed
Love is never easy
It’s short of the hope we have for happiness
Bright and sweet
Love is never easy street!
Now we are black and white
Embracing out in the lunatic New York night
It’s very unlikely we’ll be driven out of town
Or be hung in a tree
That’s unlikely!

Tonight these crowds
Are happy and loud
Children are up dancing in the streets
In the sticky middle of the night
Summer serenade
Of taxi horns and fun arcades
Where right or wrong
Under neon
Every feeling goes on!
For you and me
The sidewalk is a history book
And a circus
Dangerous clowns
Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions
They have been handed
Day by day
Generations on down

We came up from the subway
On the music midnight makes
To Charlie’s bass and Lester’s saxophone
In taxi horns and brakes
Now Charlie’s down in Mexico
With the healers
So the sidewalk leads us with music
To two little dancers
Dancing outside a black bar
There’s a sign up on the awning
It says “Pork Pie Hat Bar”
And there’s black babies dancing…
Tonight!

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Joni Mitchell has released many songs over the years besides Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Joni Mitchell released songs from 1968 to 2007 spanning across albums like Song To A Seagull, Clouds, Ladies Of The Canyon, Blue, For The Roses, Court And Spark, The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, Hejira, Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, Mingus, Wild Things Run Fast, Dog Eat Dog, Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm, Night Ride Home, Turbulent Indigo, Taming The Tiger, Both Sides Now, and Shine. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Joni Mitchell.

If you're a fan of 1970s songs looking for more songs from 1979 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and Goodbye Pork Pie Hat by Joni Mitchell

The lyrics for Goodbye Pork Pie Hat are defined as the words making up the song released by Joni Mitchell in 1979. It also includes the verses and words used by the background chorus in the song. Like many hit songs, the lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat have different meanings to different people. While it is clear in some of the lyrics what the artist is trying to really say, only Joni Mitchell and those working with them know all of the meanings behind all of the lyrics to their songs.

Some folks are interested in word and phrase etymology. It is easy to understand the lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat by Joni Mitchell if you think through it. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" means the words set to the music of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Joni Mitchell. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and the lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Joni Mitchell who came here looking just for the lyrics to Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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