Fifty-Nine Cannons

Lyrics

[Intro]
The air was thick. July nineteenth.
Seventeen seventy-six.
We all stood on the common, waiting.
The dust from the Boston post road still settling on our shoes.
A piece of paper had arrived.

[Verse 1]
Someone read the words aloud.
Jefferson's neat and angry script, carried by a tired horse.
"A history of repeated injuries..."
The words hung there, in the heat.
Against the drone of horseflies.
Against the simple white of the meeting house.
A promise. A threat. An ending. A beginning.

[Chorus]
And then the sound.
You remember it as cannons. A grand salute.
But it wasn't cannons.
It was the men you knew.
The farmer, the cooper, the blacksmith.
Fifty-nine shoulders braced.
Fifty-nine muskets, speaking as one.
A crack that broke the summer quiet.

[Verse 2]
The smoke hung blue and acrid over the green.
Smelled like a new kind of freedom.
Or just a battle yet to come.
They brought out the King's arms, torn from a tavern wall.
Just a painted piece of wood, really.
But we watched it catch and curl in the bonfire.
Watched a lion and a unicorn turn to ash.
No one said much. We just watched it burn.

[Bridge]
Then the town vote.
Hands raised in the smoky afternoon.
A pledge.
"With our lives and fortunes."
Easy words to say on a hot day, with the crowd behind you.
Harder to mean in the cold winter, when the news is bad.
But we meant it. That day, we meant it.

[Chorus]
And the sound.
You can call it cannons, if the story sounds better that way.
But it wasn't cannons.
It was us.
Fifty-nine neighbors, with powder-stained hands.
Fifty-nine muskets, speaking as one.
A crack that broke the King's peace for good.

[Outro]
Fifty-nine.
Why fifty-nine?
No one remembers now.
Maybe for the men in the company.
Maybe it just sounded right.
The number hangs in the air, like the smoke did.
A local secret.
A ragged volley.
Our little declaration.