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Hall’s “Halifax” may not be as sentimental or moving as “Remember Me,” or as vividly tragic as “Cold Missouri Waters,” but it recognizes the ties that bind, and the glimpses of human connection and community appearing in the bleakest of times. These are not entirely ephemeral goods, as symbolized still by Nova Scotia’s annual gift of a spruce Christmas tree to the City of Boston as thanks for its citizens’ selfless compassion when Halifax lay smoldering and devastated beneath a foot of snow.

Here’s “Halifax” (lyrics)     on Spotify

“I can’t see no water, but I’m about to drown…” – Pat Blackman

Years ago I asked my mother, who grew up as a West Virginia farm girl, what she feared most as a child.  Her answer came immediately in that gruff, straightforward ‘tell the bad stuff like it is’ tone that was part of her Appalachian birthright – “floods.”  Though it was an anxiety I had never known, the way she described how quickly the water could rise from the hollows to cover the valleys made a deep impression on me; as did her account of families waiting helplessly to find out what the water might in moments erase from their hardscrabble mountain homesteads.

Eric Bibb in Jenny Bohman tribute concert at Fasching, Stockholm, April 2012 – by Begnt Nyman – Wikimedia Commons

My featured song is not about water, though I considered such in two favorite examples.  In Gillian Welch’s stark “Ruination Day, Part 2” “God moves on the water like Casey Jones.”  As well, Tony Rice’s “Galveston Flood,” a reworking of the turn-of-the-century spiritual “Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm,” gives a terrifying view of the deadliest natural disaster in American history – the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.  But, the former will probably show up in that Titanic post I mentioned and the latter deserves a post of its own.

Today then I want to showcase a song that gives voice to that deep insecurity my mother evoked so vividly for me – that sense that disaster is coming and all you can do is pray that it doesn’t take everything from you and yours.  It’s a farmer’s song in which a common plague is personified, giving dread and destruction a face of its own – “The Boll Weevil.”  Often, giving voice to your fears is the best way to live with them.  Pairing them with music allows something more.  I’ve known many versions of this song for years, but Eric Bibb’s from Deeper in the Well brings it all home to me.  I know my Mom would love it.

Here’s “Boll Weevil” (lyrics)  –   on Spotify

 Coda – “Get out the pans, don’t just stand there dreaming…” – Pat Blackman

Even in our three featured choices, you see wonderful variation.  Cindy is at sea, Ken’s in port, and I’m inland.  Ken pointed out as well that, in reverse, there is fear of disaster, disaster itself, and rising again after the tragedy.  But what of Rebecca Solnit’s observation?  “Disaster makes it clear that our interdependence is not only an inescapable fact but a fact worth celebrating.”  We know those waters from our genre of choice.  Where do these three songs fit on that chart?

Certainly “Halifax” lyrically covers both interdependence and commemoration, if not overt celebration. “The Mary Ellen Carter” is musically the opposite, and its chorus could save a drowning soul. Though it laments the lack of interdependence between drunken officers and desperate crew, it enlists any who can listen to find sea legs and join up.  “Boll Weevil” lyrically seems focused only on the farmer and the pest, though that evokes an uneasy interdependence in and of itself – “you better treat me right…” But the power of the music and the subject meant a web of southern farmers, white and black, shared in its art because they needed to express the fear and loss it represented.  Certainly one could imagine all sorts of social celebration and good times singing it, especially after a good harvest – the revelers always knowing that another season would bring the same risk of losing everything.

 I want to leave you with one last song that I think, strangely, captures what Solnit was on about – “Here Comes Sunshine.”  Robert Hunter wrote it in the early 1970s – “Remembering the great Vanport, Washington flood of 1949, living in other people’s homes, a family abandoned by father; second grade.”  One can easily imagine the adult lyricist looking metaphorically at the ‘wake of the flood’ that was the 1960s as well.  Either way it’s got interdependence and celebration, as well as that arc between “the misfortune and the music,” to spare.  Thanks for reading and listening this week, folks!

Here’s “Here Comes Sunshine” (lyrics)  –  on Spotify