Joan Baez - Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose) Lyrics

My goodness, Joan so great.

Billy Rose can stay in peace for ever.

For an American she has one of the best voices. There aren't that many good American woman singers.

Don't mess with me,just take me home.

I cried when I was a teenager, when listening to this song ,I' m 62 now and I still feel tears comming to my eyes listening to it now.

i'm a couple years younger, but i feel you.
ever since my teenage years this music and these words have been there. and i wouldn't want it any other way. <3

This song is so relevant for today.

so beautiful .

brings tears of sorrow in my eyes

Raise the prisons to the ground and let the criminals victimize more innocent people?

help us raze the prisons to the ground.

This song is beautiful.May be Joan is not much of a songwriter but here she wrote something that deserves to be heard and thought about.

Build the wall!

Joan Baez's voice is the most beautiful female voice I have ever heard.

You should see her in concert. Clearly a bucket lister!!!!! It was an Epic experience ~ Debbie

Me too for nothing has really changed

listen to these lyrics...Baez suggests that the very idea of prisons ought to make us question what we value as civilised people..."And we'll raze the prisons to the ground!"

My opinion is she is above all cause she always stands in favor of humanity.

my name is billy rose

Do you know trouble like the same of your own name?

"When we wiped out the bosses and stormed through the wall
 Of the prison they told us would outlast us all."

From "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade."

beautiful...heart rending..

When we imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, there's a problem.  Not only that, a disproportionate of the people who land in prison are working class or poor.  We have an unjust system that needs reform.  Unfortunately it is now being driven by money since much of our prison system has been privatized.  This is a beautiful song. 

What romantic, half baked, leftist, liberal garbage ! A tale of three irresponsible law breakers, one who even left a wife and child by taking his own life. Baez was very talented, a fantastic singer, but her politics were and still are cloud cuckoo land.

@mackenzie it sound like you were calling Baez liberal garbage so.....

No, they should have starved to death in the barren wasteland in what we left of Mexico after the 1848 war,

mackenzie “.... there but for fortune go you and I.” https://youtu.be/YKq-nVdiQ8U

mackenzie No. You are clueless and don't understand another person's plight and how it relates to how the world runs. That's all. I will pray that you find truth and develop more empathy.

B.B. King?????????????

.... except the other musicians who regularly perform in prisons?

At some point when she was in prison she got the custler arts prize, i only found out as i was doing a play about Hindley

what? when?

No musician could muster the courage to perform in prisons like Johnny Cash and joan Baez did.

i can't stand this song after knowing the child murder myra hindley won a prize for singing it!

Thanks Joan!

There are several faults in our "criminal justice system," among which are the prison systems.
This song tells it all.

make me a bit crying when i heard it, so sad,
great singer
great Joan Baez
I love you

for me, thank for my Mum :)

Thanks to my english teacher to have make me listenning to this song

This is a very powerful song. It is a song that could probably sway many people to a single thought. If politicians could speak with the energy and power of Joan Baez, I think our world would be much different.. AND THATS NOT ALWAYS A GOOD THING..

Wow!!! This is one of the most powerful songs she has ever written! So brilliant, and incredibly haunting.

Raze the prisons to the ground....

"...This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim...."

@northfourty Please read Dr. Karl Menninger's the Crime of Punishment. He would have loved this song.

@jkohler2
seriously?
it actually happend or is just like everyone humming the final countdown?

I worked in a California county jail for a year. The ballad of Billy Rose
rings clearly and truly

gets the goose pimples going

And we're gonna raze, raze the prisons
To the ground
Help us raze, raze the prisons
To the ground
....
i light on a fire in my mind.
thinking, one more time, about friends who are now in prison...
knowing them, and so knowing that our idea of the liberty is bigger than any cage.
still waiting the moment in which we meet again (to raze, raze the prisons to the ground, and open cage after cage)

there used to be a live performance of this song by joan baez on sing sing prison.. unfortunately it dissapeared.. if someone knows where can it be found please post the link here

I wish the video of her performing this live in a prison was still up....

It sure brings backs memories of the good ole music I grew up with. We have very few musicians of this caliber now a days.

godalmighty this one takes me back.
tears me up

And humanity refuses to evolve and improve beyond this ugly, ugly inhumanity of incarceration FOR FKG PROFiT!

This is my favorite song.. Thank you so much for uploading it.