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“No, I wouldn’t say… no, I’m not religious.”– Tom Waits

Emerging from the bluesy slow march of “Chocolate Jesus,” with its lyrics of playful, confectionary salvation, the slow, full piano chords of “Georgia Lee” immediately signal a somber turn. Waits’s opening lines, “Cold was the night, and hard was the ground, they found her in a small grove of trees” set the scene of loss.

Hymnal page with lyrics to “Dark was the night, cold was the ground”/”Gethsemane” by Thomas Haweis (source: hymnary.org)

Waits and Brennan also cast religious allusions with these opening words. The opening phrase invokes Blind Willie Johnson’s Gospel Blues classic “Dark was the night, cold was the ground,” (YouTube, Spotify) or the lyrics of the hymn from which Johnson’s piece itself drew, alternately called “Gethsemane.” The Johnson piece, a mostly instrumental work of slide guitar brilliance, was selected by Carl Sagan for the Voyager Golden Record, launched into space on Voyager 1 to introduce our world to whomever might intercept it. The 19th century hymn by Thomas Haweis, presents Jesus’ tribulations in the Garden of Gethsemane, as he faced his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death.

Dark was the night, and cold the ground
On which the Lord was laid;
His sweat like drops of blood ran down;
In agony he prayed:

In this subtle invocation of the older song, the Georgia Lee of the Waits and Brennan’s song becomes a Jesus-like figure.The lyrics project onto Georgia Lee a heartbreaking sense of abandonment and isolation in the face of death, resonating with Jesus’ moments in the Garden of Gethsemane. The song also invites us to confront what meaning her death holds for us. It urges us to answer the refrain’s questions for Georgia Lee and for ourselves. In Josh Ritter’s terms, is that same God we thought should be looking out for Georgia Lee looking out for us as well? Watching. Listening. Being there.

The song’s stanzas continue with meditations on the perilous transition between childhood and adulthood. Distinct from the theological dimensions of the song, “Georgia Lee” grabs me as a parent, penetrating the anxieties of keeping kids safe, and knowing that you can only do so much, especially as they emerge gradually and fitfully into adulthood.

Waits acknowledged the broad distribution of failures in Georgia’s case in a 1999 interview with Ripsense:

“I guess everybody was wondering, where were the police, where was the deacon, where were the social workers, and where was I and where were you. Now that she’s gone, one thing that’s come out of it is that her neighbor has opened her home as a place where teenaged girls can come, where latchkey kids can come and hang out after school till their parents get home. A lot of kids are raising their parents. You usually run away because you want someone to come and get you, but the water is full of sharks.”

I don’t suppose you would need to believe in any kind of God, or to be any kind of parent, to connect with the plaintive urgency of Waits’s refrain. “God” is just the tip of the iceberg; a potent symbol addressing the manifold ways the world of adults and parents failed Georgia. I’ve read plausible and sincere interpretations of the song that include us all within that “God” symbol, with varying degrees of responsibility. I’ve seen other, more strained, interpretations that suggest the press is the “God” to which the song refers, as though it was media attention that failed her after the fact. Waits and Brennan are on the trail of something far more substantive than that—at once existential and theological, and also humane and sociological.

Barnett Newman “Stations of the Cross: lema sabachthani” (1958-1966) Station One, National Gallery of Art.

Waits’s lonely, heart-weary delivery of the song’s refrain is key to its success, and essential to making this song a lament rather than a remonstrance. Beyond the signature qualities of his voice, he comes back to the refrain bewildered and sad, not angry. One potential liability of cover versions of this song is that harmonies and joined voices on the refrains can tend to diminish its sense of loneliness, despair, and truly fundamental theological doubt. They may instead appear as strident expressions of shared indignation at God’s failure (or everybody else’s).  Waits’s voice provides a vicarious, Job-like wrestling with suffering; grappling with the problem of evil through evil’s destruction of an innocent. Crucially, Waits asks the questions of the refrain most thoroughly, whether theistically or atheistically, both in what he sings and how he sings it. He invites us to ask the tough questions all the way down, although never fully resolving to an answer, or even emerging with much confidence that one will be found.

Paradoxically. in the face of this existential doubt, “Georgia Lee” gives the real Georgia Lee an important legacy in the wake of tragedy, one that has already inspired others to watch, listen, and be there for kids in danger and kids on the margins. If we can believe Waits’s account to Robert Lloyd, without his own daughter’s gentle objection, we might not have that legacy at all.

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