To Will Rogers

There’ll come a day and you’ll make a list of the greatest men of time

You’ll choose them well and place them where their merit seems to rhyme

Perhaps not first and still not last but somewhere ‘long the line

You’ll name Will Rogers, a friend of yours, of “The King of Kings”, and mine.

For he met all men on equal terms and thus he met all things

From the deep despair of oppression’s glare to the halls where freedom rings

And if he ever shook your hand, my friend, ‘tis a summer’s touch he brings

For he’d hold your hand with no less warmth than when he held a king’s.

Over wing-born trails and roaring rails, o’er the ocean-sweep and swirl

To a foreign land but to meet a man and a friendship there unfurl

For his words came light as the dancing flight of the lariat he twirls

And it flew from his hand like a lightening strand to capture the heart of the world.

Let his sage advice be counted twice though he said it with a grin,

“You can never stand against the common man, there’s too dog-gone much of him.”

And if my memory serves me well and good, I still can hear him say,

“There is no man that I don’t like who ever passed my way.”

As I gaze on a world into tension hurled, I’m reminded constantly

Of a smile long lost in the frozen frost but what a wondrous thing t’would be

If his laughing ways like the sunny days from an inexhaustive store

Were the crowning part of the common heart to live forever more.

So the whimsy of his smile remains as the rolling years descend

And his voice springs up from the northern lights to the far-flung trails of men.

From Claremore to the distant poles or follow the west-wind’s wend

And you’ve never met his like before and you never will again.

For permission to record Bob Nolan's music, contact: The Songwriter’s Guild of America

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