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Undated photograph of Georgia Moses (1985-1997) (source, Petaluma Press Democrat, uncredited)

“Georgia Lee” tells the story of Georgia Lee Moses, a 12 year old girl from Petaluma, California. Georgia had dropped out of school to take care of her mother, Ida, who was developmentally challenged, as well as her 7 year old sister. Georgia’s father was not in the picture, and Ida’s boyfriend had moved in with the family.  Georgia, who to many appeared older than her actual age, found herself on her own in the summer of 1997. She may have run away from home, perhaps, as some sources suggest, seeking to avoid the man who was living with her mother. She was last seen alive on the evening of August 13, 1997 in the company of a 25-30 year old man. No one reported her missing. Her body was discovered in a grove of trees by a freeway on-ramp in Petaluma eight days after that last sighting. She had been strangled. Her murder has never been solved.

Georgia’s death received scant coverage relative to the international media attention that arose four years earlier from the murder of another twelve year old Petaluma girl, Polly Klaas. About 200 people attended Georgia Lee Moses’s October 1997 memorial service at Community Baptist Church in neighboring Santa Rosa, California. Tom Waits was one of them, sitting toward the back.

In the years since Georgia’s murder, a memorial was erected in her memory, first at the site where her body was found, and later relocated to Petaluma’s City Hall. Several local community organizations dedicated to helping un- or under-supervised children have sprung up in the wake of her killing, including at least one prompted by someone hearing “Georgia Lee.”

Cover of April 1999 edition of LA Weekly (photo by Jay Blakesberg)

Robert Lloyd’s LA Weekly interview with Waits from 1999 includes Waits’s account of the song’s genesis, and how it wound up staying on Mule Variations when he was initially inclined to cut it. Waits is justly famous for being an almost wholly unreliable interviewee—depending, that is, on what you’re counting on hearing. He is more candid than usual in Lloyd’s account here.

“Driving me back to my hotel in the big black Silverado he calls (today, at least) Old Reliable, Waits detours to a flower-bedecked makeshift roadside shrine dedicated to the memory of 12-year-old Georgia Lee Moses, the subject of  ‘Georgia Lee,’ a lilting Irishy lullaby on Mule Variations.

‘It’s a good spot,’ he says as we pull over to a grassy plot of trees and brush by a freeway onramp. ‘She’d run away from home, been missing for like a week. I guess this is where they found the body.’ He takes a plastic point-and-click camera from his pocket and shoots a picture. ‘Not to make it a racial matter, but it was one of those things where, you know, she’s a black kid, and when it comes to missing children and unsolved crimes, a lot of it has to do with timing, or publicity . . . and there was this whole Polly Klaas Foundation up here, while Georgia Lee did not get any real attention. And I wanted to write a song about it. At one point I wasn’t going to put it on the record, there were too many songs. But my daughter said, “Gee, that would really be sad — she gets killed and not remembered and somebody writes a song about it and doesn’t put it on the record.” I didn’t want to be a part of that.'”

Tom Waits (source: uncredited profile pic on Facebook)

“Do you know how many teardrops it takes to fill up a teaspoon?”

Waits has said that he views interviews as neither depositions nor therapy, and he regularly shows that he views neither pedestrian candor nor actual, relevant facts as requirements for his replies. He often launches into fanciful bits of odd trivia only loosely related to the question at hand. I sympathize with this impulse, and appreciate that he appears so constitutionally averse to answering questions with the same earnestness in which they are asked. Speaking to Mick Brown in 1999, Waits said:

Book cover photograph: Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty Images

“The whole thing’s an act. Nobody would really show you who they are—nobody would ever dare to do that, and if they do, they change their mind after a while because it gets to a point where you don’t know what’s true anymore. The dice is throwing the man, instead of the man throwing the dice.”

Asking what Waits really “means” by lines like “Why wasn’t God watching?” or how that might relate to his own religious convictions, or even his experience of sitting in Georgia’s memorial service is probably the least interesting or helpful thing we can ask. It’s also decidedly a question that he will never answer straightforwardly. For this we should be grateful.

His jester-like resistance to candor hints to me why I can’t find much record of Waits discussing “Georgia Lee.” If I had to guess, I would suppose that he respectfully wishes to exempt this song’s sober subject from his typically whimsical interview replies. Aside from the citation I provided above, and a couple other places, most of the interviews I’ve found don’t discuss it – including over 50 pages of interviews about Mule Variations in Paul Maher, Jr.’s Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters.

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