Lyrics to
Uncle Son

This version of Uncle Son was released by The Kinks in 1971.

Our About The Kinks page at Decade Lyrics includes the lyrics for Uncle Son from 1971 as well as all of the other lyrics from The Kinks that we have in our lyrics database.

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

He was just a workin’ man,
Simple rules and simple plans,
Fancy words he didn’t understand,
He loved with his heart,
He worked with his hands.

Liberals dream of equal rights,
Conservatives live in a world gone by,
Socialists preach of a promised land,
But old Uncle Son was an ordinary man.

Bless you Uncle Son,
They won’t forget you when the revolution comes.

Unionists tell you when to strike,
Generals tell you when to fight,
Preachers teach you wrong from right,
They’ll feed you when you’re born,
And use you all your life.

Bless you Uncle Son,
They won’t forget you when the revolution comes.

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The Kinks has released many songs over the years besides Uncle Son. The Kinks released songs from 1964 to 1993 spanning across albums like Kinks, Kinda Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy, Face To Face, Something Else, The Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire), Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One, Muswell Hillbillies, Percy, Everybody's In Show-Biz, Preservation Act I, Preservation Act II, Soap Opera, Schoolboys In Disgrace, Sleepwalker, Misfits, Low Budget, Give The People What They Want, State Of Confusion, Word Of Mouth, Think Visual, UK Jive, and Phobia. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by The Kinks.

If you're a fan of 1970s music looking for more songs from 1971 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and Uncle Son by The Kinks

When you decide to study the lyrics to Uncle Son, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1971 song by The Kinks. Some of the lyrics to Uncle Son have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only The Kinks and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

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

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