Nurture your Nature

Yellowbird 🇭🇹 Mills Brothers [E]

This isn't the version I remember. "Choucoune" is a Haitian poem going back to the 1880s. It has spawned many versions. Harry Belafonte had a well-known version and there are others with steelpan drums.

But this version will do.

We sang it in high-school chorus in the 1960s. I doubt if we did it with a calypso flair.

Like so many attempts to expand our horizons beyond Bach, we were still a German-American factory town.



Lyrics

Yellow Bird
Up high in banana tree
Yellow Bird
You sit all alone like me
Did your lady friend
Leave your nest again
This is very sad
Makes me feel so bad
You can fly away
In the sky away
You're more lucky than me

I also had a pretty girl
She's not with me today
They're all the same
The pretty girls
Take tenderness
Then they fly away
Yellow Bird
Up high in banana tree
Yellow Bird
You sit all alone like me
Let her fly away
In the sky away
Pick a town and soon
Take from night to noon
Black and yellow you
Like banana too
They might pick you someday

Wish that I were a yellow bird
I'd fly away with you
But I am not a yellow bird
So here I sit
Nothing else to do
Yellow Bird
Yellow Bird
Yellow Bird