The Dubliners - Hot Asphalt

Hot Asphalt

Good evenin' all me jolly lads
I'm glad to find you well
If you gather all around me
Now the story I will tell
For I've got a situation and begorrah and begob
I can whisper I've the weekly wage of nineteen bob
'tIs twelve months come October
Since I left me native home
After helping in Killarney, boys
To bring the harvest down
But now I wear the geansai and around me waist a belt
I'm the gaffer of the squad that makes the hot asphalt

Chorus:
Well we laid it in the hollows
And we laid it in the flat
Andi f it doesn't last forever
Sure I'll swear I'll eat me hat
Well, I've wandered up and down the world
But sure I've never felt
Any surface that was equal to the hot asphalt

The other night a copper comes and
He says to me 'McGuire
Would you kindly let me light me pipe
Down at your boiler fire?'
And he planks himself right down in front
With hobnails up, till late,
And says I 'Me decent man, you'd better go
And mind your pate'
He ups and yells 'I'm down on you
I'm up to all yer pranks
Don't I know you for a traitor from
The Tipperary ranks?'
Boys, I hit straight from the shoulder
And I gave him such a belt
That I knocked him into the boiler
Full of hot asphalt

We quickly dragged him out again
And we threw him in the tub
And with soap and warm water
We began to rub and scrub
But devil the thing, it hardened and
It turned him hard as stone
And with every other rub sure you could
Hear the copper groan
'I'm thinkin', says O'Reilly, 'That he's
Lookin' like Ould Nick,
And burn me if I'm not inclined
To claim him with me pick'
'Now', says I, 'It would be easier
To boil him till he melts
And to stir him nice and easy in the hot asphalt'
You may talk about yer sailor lads
Ballad singers and the rest
Your shoemakers and your tailors
But we please the ladies best
The only ones who know the way
Their flinty hearts to melt
Are the lads around the boiler making hot asphalt
With rubbing and with scrubbing sure
I caught me death of cold
And for scientific purposes me body it was sold
In the Kelvingrove Museum me boys
I'm hangin' in me pelt
As a monument to the Irish, mixing hot asphalt

Chorus.