The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away
They're tryin' to wash us away

lyrics here

My internal soundtrack is determined to be optimistic.

I WENT BACK TO OHIO
BUT MY CITY WAS GONE
THERE WAS NO TRAIN STATION
THERE WAS NO DOWNTOWN
SOUTH HOWARD HAD DISAPPEARED
ALL MY FAVORITE PLACES
MY CITY HAD BEEN PULLED DOWN
REDUCED TO PARKING SPACES
A, O, WAY TO GO OHIO

WELL I WENT BACK TO OHIO
BUT MY FAMILY WAS GONE
I STOOD ON THE BACK PORCH
THERE WAS NOBODY HOME
I WAS STUNNED AND AMAZED
MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
SLOWLY SWIRLED PAST
LIKE THE WIND THROUGH THE TREES
A, O, OH WAY TO GO OHIO

I WENT BACK TO OHIO
BUT MY PRETTY COUNTRYSIDE
HAD BEEN PAVED DOWN THE MIDDLE
BY A GOVERNMENT THAT HAD NO PRIDE
THE FARMS OF OHIO
HAD BEEN REPLACED BY SHOPPING MALLS
AND MUZAK FILLED THE AIR
FROM SENECA TO CUYAHOGA FALLS
SAID, A, O, OH WAY TO GO OHIO

(sorry 'bout the caps - cut 'n' pasted from the Pretenders site)

Mud is everywhere.
Fish are swimming in the fields.
Everybody's running around, they're yelling
Is this the end of the known world?

OOH, OOH I know this one, Phillip J. Fry, he's always singing that shit...

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry, them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye,
Singin’, "this’ll be the day that I die.
"this’ll be the day that I die."

I'm pretty certain the levee isn't dry though.

I truly need ... a year down in New Orleans,
the hum of a southern drawl that I could understand
...
Now when I'm lonely ... I send my heart down to New Orleans
to chase my memories alone down through my dreams

Year Down in New Orleans

Like Tom Whitmore, I've had that as my personal soundtrack for a while now.

And sadly, Death Letter. I just hope my baby won't be lying on the cooling board when this is all over.

I thought I was the only one.

My dad used to call me Katrina so I feel vaguely guilty.

in poor taste, i know. but it is a catchy song, and it's stuck in my head.

I just can't imagine what it must be like, to more or less escape the peak of the storm and then fall victim to failing levees.

[And I too have been plagued with "Walking on Sunshine" since I first heard about Katrina as a tropical storm out in the Atlantic.]

I'm going to stop reading this thread now. Apparently y'all have l33t 34r-w0rm 5ki11z.

But now, Five Feet High and Rising. Definitely.

Live in a river town
It's pretty little
It's high on the sides and sinks in the middle
If it rains too much
The river comes down
It fills up the low spots
All over town

Get down river
River get down
Won't you get down river
River get down
Once again, you have messed up this whole town
So get down river
Get down.

"Get Down River" score

It was penned by Chicago's own folk legend Steve Goodman.

And, yes, they do still play the blues in Chicago...

chorus:
Come on get your oars and row, darling
Come on get your oars and row
We've got tide and the river rising
Come on get your oars and row

And also, Here Comes the Flood by Gabriel, in this absolutely gorgeous live clip which I was listening to just minutes before I heard of Katrina.

Basin Street Blues:

(this is copied from one of those big, faceless lyric sites, so pardon the punctuation)

Won’t you come along with me
Down that mississippi
We’ll take a boat to the land of dreams
Come along with me on, down to new orleans

Now the band’s there to greet us
Old friends will meet us
Where all them folks goin to the st. louis cemetary meet
Heaven on earth.... they call it basin street

I’m tellin’ ya, basin street...... is the street
Where all them characters from the first street they meet
New orleans..... land of dreams
You’ll never miss them rice and beans
Way down south in new orleans

They’ll be huggin’.... and a kissin’
That’s what I been missin’
And all that music....lord, if you just listen’
New orleans....i got them basin street blues

Now ain’t you glad you went with me
On down that mississippi
We took a boat to the land of dreams
Heaven on earth...they call it basin street

Ragdoll swimmers and furniture boats,
There's a cold brown wall moved into my kitchen,
I sat on the roof in my sailor's coat,
Holding my dog and my Daddy's picture.

And what have I got? And what have I taken?
And what if I burst my banks and drown this valley again?

I wanted to honor Mayor Nagin for keeping a cool head and acting like a leader. Remember the Vader has a posse meme? Well, so does NOLA's mayor.

Speaking of Guthrie tunes, I had begun plotting when I might next have a chance to go home on the City of New Orleans via the California Zephyr from Denver. Next year's French Quarter Festival was looking like a good excuse. I bet the FQ Fest will go on next year out of pure ornery, but I fear the trains might not yet be running in late April.

SIx feet of water in the steets of Evangeline.

Yep.

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

wil

Oh, and I've had "Take Me to the River" in my head for days now.

The net only knows why.

http://http//www.example.net is resolved:
http://www.microsoft.com
The net only knows why.

All the way home from Baltimore We couldn't find a seat Conductor says he's sorry for The blisters on our feet Comes a-riding in a bus The high and the low Mommy, daddy, you and I Going on a trip And we're not going home Mommy, daddy, you and I

Driving, keep driving
Driving, driving all night
Sleeping on my daddy's shoulder
Drinking from a paper cup
And I'm wearing my grandfather's clothes
And they say that up North it gets cold

Crawling out of bed one night
Walking in my sleep
We're not the only family
To take this little trip...

I've always wondered when I'd next see Americans moving to that soundtrack.

Perhaps this resolves to MS because you are using an MS-created browser?
"Safari can’t find the server.
Safari can’t open the page “http://http//www.boingboing.net/2005/08/17/vader_has_a_posse_st.html” because it can’t find the server “http”."

(Well, I'm pretty sure it was originally a 78, but you know...)

As for me, since I started reading this thread I've been earwormed by Buddy & Julie Miller's "Dirty Water", which apparently Google is unwilling to find me the lyrics for, but there's a sample on their homepage.

(For me it's been the Led Zep cover of "When the Levee Breaks"; it got a leg up because I was listening to the Early Days best-of compilation on Saturday night.)

...and I didn't have that particular earworm before reading this thread, so I hate you all... :)

Run for high ground, seek shelter with friends
Wait there and pray that when it all ends
There's something left of what you struggled for
A reason to carry on...

colliding weirdly with Jethro Tull's "Something's On the Move".

Here we are
Stuck by this river,
You and I
Underneath a sky that's ever falling down, down, down
Ever falling down

Through the day
As if on an ocean
Waiting here,
Always failing to remember why we came, came, came:
I wonder why we came.

You talk to me
as if from a distance
And I reply
With impressions chosen from another time, time, time,
From another time.

It's almost too gentle a song for the moment, but it's so surreal that it approaches the detachment I occasionally feel as I try to comprehend the gestalt of this disaster.

Of course, now that I've read this thread, some of the other tunes mentioned here are beginning to clamor for inner-ear space.

And I can't unwrite it, but believe me I'm missing New Orleans now.

N-O-L-A, NOLA, no-no-no-no-no-no, NOLA...

"...well I'm not dumb, but I can't understand
why they didn't evacuate to the last man
down in NOLA..."

Chorus:

Dubya sent our levee to Iraq
Not sure when we'll get it back
Now we're hopin' for a gov'm'nt shack
Cos Dubya sent our levee to Iraq

Our family's gone, we're mostly dead
Cos WMD went to Dubya's head
Don't know what we're gonna do
Stuff happens don't it, to me and you

Chorus

Baker says God cleaned up a mess
Laura appears in nice new dress
She can't remember the name of the storm
Says criticism of Dubya's disgusting form

Chorus

Kyl says folks shouldn't live where stuff might happen
Unless of course it happens in Aspen
Muskowski says we're not in plight
Dubya says, What didn't go right?

Chorus

Dick Cheney says the exercise went fine
Barbara says the underpriveleged are doin' well
From where I'm at, don't look too fine
If this is good, then what is hell?

Chorus

Brownie did one heck of a job
With results quite unacceptable
Condolleezzaa says don't heed the mob
Discrimination is simply just not credible

Chorus

We're startin' over right from scratch
Like all those we've bombed in far Iraq
And Haliburton's here to help
For half a billion dollars pelf

Dubya sent our levee to Iraq
Not sure when we'll get it back
Now we're hopin' for a gov'm'nt shack
Cos Dubya sent our levee to Iraq

Copyright 2005, Cashel Boylo