Malvina Reynolds: Song Lyrics and Poems  

The Money Crop

Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1966 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1994.

Well, money has its own way,
And money has to grow.
It grows on human blood and bone,
As any child would know.
It's iron stuff and paper stuff
With no life of its own,
And so it takes its growing sap
From human blood and bone.

And many a child goes hungering
Because the wage is low,
And men die on the battlefield
To make the money grow.
And those that take the money crop
Are avid without end,
They plant it in the tenements
To make it grow again.

The little that they leave for us,
It cannot be a seed.
We spend it for the shoddy clothes
And every daily need.
We spend it in a minute,
In an hour it is gone,
To find its way to grow again
On human blood and bone,
Blood and bone.

Malvina Reynolds songbook(s) in which the music to this song appears:
---- The Muse of Parker Street
---- The Malvina Reynolds Songbook

Other place(s) where the music to this song appears:
---- Broadside No. 79 (February-March 1967)
---- Sing Out!, Volume 21(6) (1972), p. 23

Recordings by other artists on which this song is performed:
---- Jan Hammarlund: Landet Jag är Van Vid, (Silence SRS 4634, 1976)
---- Faith Petric: Faith Petric (Bay Records 216, 1979)
---- Rosalie Sorrels: No Closing Chord; The Songs of Malvina Reynolds (Red House Records RHR CD 143, 2000)
---- listen to youtube.com video