When You and I Were Young, Maggie

Craig Johnson not only writes some of our favorite songs, often he reminds us of songs we've known so long we'd simply forgotten how good they really were. Pansy Pickren, my second-grade teacher down in Palatka, Florida, taught me (and the rest of the class) this "chestnut" over a half-century ago. I loved it then, and I love it even more now that I'm old enough to understand it. It was hearing Craig sing it in a living room in Harrisburg, PA, one evening, that brought it back to my mind. This is the kind of sentimental old song we used to sinR around the piano in the parlor when I was growing up. Remember those oldtime, pre-TV, family gatherings? The song was written back around the end of the Civil War by one George W. Johnson. You can find it, appropriately enough, in Heart Songs (Chapple Publishing Co., Boston, 1909), where the melody is attributed to J. A. Butterfield..

And now we are aged and gray, Maggie;
The trials of life nearly done.
Let us sing of the days that are gone, Maggie,
When you and I were young.

A city, so silent and lone, Maggie,
Where the young and the gay and the blest,
In polished, white mansions of stone, Maggie,
Have each found a place of rest,
Is built where the birds used to play, Maggie,
And join in the songs that were sung;
And we sang as gaily as they, Maggie,
When you and I were young.

And now we are aged . . .

And now I am feeble with age, Maggie,
My step less sprightly than then,
My face is a well-written page, Maggie,
And time, alone, was the pen.
And they say we are age and gray, Maggie,
As spray by the white breakers flung;
But, to me, you're as fair as you were, Maggie,
When you and I were young.

And now we are aged . . .

Yes, now we are aged and gray, Maggie,
The trials of life nearly done;
But, to me, you're as fair as you were, Maggie,
When you and I were young.