** To see the lyrics, click SHOW MORE ** - From the Broadway musical "Sail Away" 1961
Composer and lyricist: Noel Coward - Piano and musical arrangement: Peter Matz
Travel they say improves the mind,
An irritating platitude, which frankly, entre nous,
Is very far from true.
Personally I've yet to find that longitude and latitude
Can educate those scores of monumental bores
Who travel in groups and herds and troupes
Of varying breeds and sexes
Till the whole world reels to shouts and squeals
And the clicking of Rolliflexes.
Why do the wrong people travel, travel travel
When the right people stay back home?
What compulsion compels them and who the hell tells them
To drag their cans to Zanzibar, instead of staying quietly in Omaha.
The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canal
And the sunny French Riviera
Would be less oppressed if the Middle West
Would settle for somewhere rather nearer
Please do not think that I criticize or cavil at a genuine urge to roam
But why, oh why do the wrong people travel
When the right people stay back home,
And mind their business
When the right people stay back home,
With Cinerama
When the right people stay back home,
I'm merely asking
Why the right people stay back home.
Just when you think romance is ripe it rather sharply dawns on you
That each sweet serenade is for the tourist trade.
Any attractive native type who resolutely fawns on you
Will give as her address American Express.
There isn't a rock between Bangkok and the beaches of Hispianola
That does not recoil from suntan oil and the gurgle of Coca Cola.
Why do the wrong people travel, travel travel
When the right people stay back home?
What explains this mass mania to leave Pennsylvania
And clack around like flocks of geese
Demanding dry martinis on the isles of Greece
On the smallest street, where the gourmets meet,
They invariably fetch up
And it's hard to make them accept a steak
that isn't served rare and smeared with ketchup
Millions of tourists are churning up the gravel
While they gaze at Saint Peters Dome,
But why, oh why do the wrong people travel
When the right people stay back home,
And eat hot doughnuts
When the right people stay back home,
With all that lettuce
When the right people stay back home,
Won't someone tell me
Why the right people stay back home.
Why do the wrong people travel, travel travel
When the right people stay back home?
What peculiar obsessions inspire those processions
Of families from Houston Tex
With all those cameras around their necks?
They will take a train or an aeroplane
For an hour on the Costa Brava
And they'll see Pomeii
On the only day
When it's up to its ass in molten lava!
It would take years to unravel, ravel ravel
Every impulse that make them roam
But why, oh why do the wrong people travel,
When the right people stay back home
With all that Kleenex
When the right people stay back home
With all the Kennedys
When the right people stay back home
I sometimes wonder why the right,
Yes the right people stay back home
Noel Coward