Strange Angels

words and music copyright ©1986, 2011 by Howard Ashby Kranz

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Standing on the freeway near Christiansburg, Virginia Where I’d spent a cold wet night and a long fruitless day

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I was having a hard trip; I was late getting nowhere; felt too hopeless to worry, I decided to pray

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Then this brand new tan buick stopped; a man opened the door

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Saying “I never have picked up hitchhikers before.”

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But he gave me a hard look, and he straightened his necktie, And he drove me about thirty miles out of his way.

G Bm C Am E C G D C B7 C D C Strange angels, strange angels; I’ve learned to look for them just when I expect nothing, these strange angels.

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One night in San Francisco, after I had just moved; Both my friends in town were busy; I had nothing to do

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Hit me sudden and hard I was lonesome and blue When the doorbell jarred me out of my trance.

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This guy’d driven all day at a furious pace just to visit the man who’d just moved from that place

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O but we got to talking; we had similar tastes, seems like we both believed in pure chance.

G Bm C Am E C G D C B7 C D C Strange angels, strange angels; I’ve learned to look for them just when I expect nothing, these strange angels.

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Sometimes when I’m feeling like there’s no place I’m going I think of something my Aunt Mary said in 1972

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We were the family poets, so when I went off to college Mary sat back & told me a few things she knew

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She said, “You’ll write great poems, but I wish you much more

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That you find great joy scrubbing a fine wooden floor.”

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She’d been dead many years before I got what she was saying, so I never could tell her, so now I’m telling you.

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Strange angels, strange angels; You’ve got to look for them when you’ve given up hoping, these strange angels.

G D Em C

Gloria in Excelsis Deo