Lyrics to
Sweet Guinevere

This version of Sweet Guinevere was released by Gordon Lightfoot in 1978.

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Sweet Guinevere you’re off to the coal town tonight
And your young brother Ernie’s up in Pittsburgh PA
You know mother loves you, and dad’s in the mine
So don’t go to the coal town, Guinevere, if you’re kind

She loves a young man and he lives in the town
And he leaves the house early for he works underground
He makes a good wage for a coal miner’s son
And she’s a bit pretty, just turned twenty-one

Sweet Guinevere you’re off to the coal town tonight
And your young brother Ernie’s up in Pittsburgh PA
You know mother loves you, and dad’s in the mine
So don’t go to the coal town, Guinevere, shut the blind

She knows her good mother’s not feelin’ no pain
She remembers an explosion and the black falling rain
She paints her thin lips in her dewy-eyed way
Then she says to the daughter, dear daughter I pray

Sweet Guinevere you’re off to the coal town tonight
And your young brother Ernie’s up in Pittsburgh PA
You know mother loves you, and dad’s in the mine
So don’t go to the coal town, Guinevere, if you’re kind

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Gordon Lightfoot has released many songs over the years besides Sweet Guinevere. Gordon Lightfoot released songs from 1966 to 2004 spanning across albums like Lightfoot!, The Way I Feel, Back Here On Earth, Did She Mention My Name, Sunday Concert, Sit Down Young Stranger / If You Could Read My Mind, Summer Side Of Life, Don Quixote, Old Dan's Records, Sundown, Cold On The Shoulder, Summertime Dream, Endless Wire, Dream Street Rose, Shadows, Salute, East Of Midnight, Waiting For You, A Painter Passing Through, and Harmony. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Gordon Lightfoot.

If you're a fan of the music of the 1970s looking for more songs from 1978 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and Sweet Guinevere by Gordon Lightfoot

When you decide to study the lyrics to Sweet Guinevere, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1978 song by Gordon Lightfoot. Some of the lyrics to Sweet Guinevere have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only Gordon Lightfoot and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

You can understand the lyrics to Sweet Guinevere if you take apart the structure of the words. 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 Sweet Guinevere" means the words set to the music of Sweet Guinevere, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Gordon Lightfoot. 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 Sweet Guinevere and the lyrics to Sweet Guinevere are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Gordon Lightfoot who came here looking just for the lyrics to Sweet Guinevere, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

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