Always loved this incredibly romantic story and at the time, Phil Ochs had set a couple of classic poems to music, The Bells and the Highwayman, both of which I really loved. So I gave this a try. You can hear the iconic music from Wagner’s opera stuck in just before the last chorus.
Lyrics
THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
Once long ago, a ship did sail
Around the cape she was bound
But the storms of fate raged all that day
And tried to bring the good ship down
The Dutchman kept his crippled wreck
Afloat all night above the brine
And swore upon the ruined deck
That he’d cross the cape if it took all time
The Devil heard the Dutchman swear
His defiance of heaven above
And cursed him in his pride to sail the oceans wide
‘til he found a woman’s love
And so he sailed the seven seas
And every seven years he’d port
His blood sails folded in the breeze
To find the woman that he sought
(Cho) Blowing in the wind and chained to the sea
On a ship that sails to eternity
Cursed by the sound of the nightwind’s wail
Forever and ever the Dutchman will sail
One night the Dutchman folded his masts
And spent the evening with the tide
And there he met a man who agreed to a plan
To sell him his daughter for his bride
Though a hunter’s love she’d long embraced
That hunter’s wife she’d never be
For she caught one glimpse of the Dutchman’s face
And fell in love with the slave of the sea
But when the Dutchman saw how her heart
Tacked so freely on a whim (he thought)
If from that hunter she’d so easily part
Would she not do the same to him
And as he rowed back on his skiff
Not knowing the love in her heart that did dwell
Into the waves from high on a cliff
A young girl’s body gently fell
(cho)
And now when winds storm in the skies
And blackened waters stir up fast
Up through the waves a ship will slowly rise
With a Dutchman standing high upon the mast
And in his arms there clings a girl
Her sea-soaked hair blowing in the breeze
Forever more these two will sail
Across the endless seven seas
(cho)