The Words Upon the Wire
Words and music by Tom May


My father, abandoned as a young boy, learned morse code at young age; and went on to be a telegraph operator for most of his life. This song was commissioned for the 150th anniversary of Creighton University in Omaha, founded by the brothers that built the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. It put the pony express out of business, and many historians give it credit for keeping California ( and the silver mines in Nevada that financed the northern Army) in the Union during the Civil War. A few decades later, it would provide my father a living during the great depression.


Verse 1
My father was abandoned, cast out upon a sea of grass
He had to learn to find a way to feed himself and forget the past
He learned to play the morse code key like a fiddlers farewell tune
Met the gamblers and the railroad bums in those smoky office rooms

Now the Creighton brothers came from Ireland, not a penny to their name
Converts to their adopted land where a man could stake a claim
A century before my father, they felt the winds of change
Took a chance upon a crazy scheme, and the world would never be the same

Chorus
My father worked the morse code key from Georgia to Wyoming
In small towns finally tied to the country ever growing
From Railroad stations and ships at sea the sentences spread like fire
There is nothing changed the world so much as the words upon the wire,
The words upon the wire.

Verse 2
He met a bride in Nebraska, she came from a humble place
Born in a little sod house, raised on the Open spaces
Together they would forge their life in the days of the model T
A telegraph operator, he traveled endlessly

Now the telegraph tied the country together, along with the Civil War
Creosote poles like sentinels marching in line from shore to shore
All the way to California Creighton strung the first long lines
From Omaha, to Frisco, to the Nevada silver mines.

Chorus
My father worked the morse code key from Georgia to Wyoming
In small towns finally tied to the country ever growing
From Railroad stations and ships at sea the sentences spread like fire
There is nothing changed the world so much as the words upon the wire,
The words upon the wire.

Verse 3
In the days of Lewis and Clark, nothing moved faster than a horse
or the speed of a river current, as a boat struggled to change its course
It is hard for us to imagine, and even harder to understand
the difference that those men could make to the way things had always been.

Now the vision that the Creighton’s had is still alive today
The messages that my father sent, still have things to say
that knowledge, along with wisdom, makes a difference still somehow
that is still can cut the distance, between us then and now ...

Chorus
My father worked the morse code key from Georgia to Wyoming
In small towns finally tied to the country ever growing
From Railroad stations and ships at sea the sentences spread like fire
There is nothing changed the world so much as the words upon the wire,
The words upon the wire.

©2003 Blue Vignette Publishing, ASCAP