Nemo James

A Good Man

From the Album The Gate

He didn’t want to set the world on fire
Never wanted his own empire
He was happy just to get along
From day to day on a prayer and a song

Didn’t have to lie, never had to cheat
Never knew the feeling of just being beat
He played the game with a laugh and a smile
A simple man with a majestic style

Chorus
He was a good man, strong and kind
You can see it in the love that he left behind
Ah ah, ah ah, he was a good man
He was a good man, and I miss him so
And I’m here to tell you I was proud to know
Ah ah, ah ah, a good man

Though life had dealt him a troubled hand
It was never more than his shoulders could stand
No matter how hard the rain fell from above
He never lost his faith in the power of love

There’s no reason why I wrote this song
No one was killed, no star was born
I just hoped that you’d be happy to hear
Of a good man who I still hold dear

THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG

During my schooldays, unless lessons involved dreaming or sport, I had very little interest in them. The only book I ever read was The Old Man and the Sea, and that was only because it had my two essential requirements, it was very short, and it was about fishing. It wasn’t until I was nineteen that I started to read, and I don’t know if it was my impressionable age or the quality of the writing, but the book that has had the most influence on my life is a book of short stories by Somerset Maughan. Forty-five years later, I can still remember most of those stories, or at least the morals behind them.
One story was called Salvatore, about a handsome fisherman from Naples. He was engaged to a beautiful young girl, but her parents wouldn’t allow them to marry until he had completed his military service. While he was serving in China, he became very ill and was told he would never fully recover. He returned to Naples, hoping to marry his sweetheart, but her mother told him, “My daughter cannot marry a man who would never be strong enough to work like a man.”
Though heartbroken, he accepted it, and ended up marrying a kind but very unattractive woman; she was the only woman in the village that would have him. They had children and, despite all that life threw at him, he and his family were very happy. In Maughan’s words, “He possessed a quality which is the rarest, the most precious and the loveliest that anyone can have. Goodness, just pure goodness.”
Maughan starts the story by wondering if it was possible to write about a simple man and keep the reader’s attention. Well, if you’re up there reading this Mr Maughan, not only did your story keep my attention, but I have thought about it many times over the years and have even written a song in its honour.