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Okay, which one do you have stuck in your head?
Not surprisingly, it’s a popular subject for the delta blues:When the Levee Breaks Down in the Flood (Crash on the Levee)
Wasn’t That a Mighty Day?
Five Feet High and Risin’
Wade in the Water
Here Comes the Flood
Throw Out the Lifeline
Back Water Blues High Water Everywhere
Southern Flood Blues
Broken Levee Blues
Rising High Water Blues
What else but this whole record, particularly this:
New Orleans is Sinking by the Tragically Hip
Oddly enough, I have Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting" (going down by the river, where it's warm and green) and Dr. John's version of "Going Back to New Orleans" running through my head.
My internal soundtrack is determined to be optimistic.
I wonder how many of those date back to the 1927 flood?
There's one other one in my head, though it was this one I kept hearing ("Things should get interesting right about now") in the Bay Area every time I crossed a bridge or went under the bay in late September, 2001.
Naught to do with New Orleans specifically, but I've had the Pretenders' "My City Was Gone" running through my head.
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HAD BEEN REPLACED BY SHOPPING MALLS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)
I was thinking Laurie Anderson's "Muddy River":
Mud is everywhere.
Fish are swimming in the fields.
Everybody's running around, they're yelling
Is this the end of the known world?
Cruelly if unavoidably, "Walking on Sunshine" by, um . . .
There is a good version of "Wasn't That a Mighty Storm" (the
same song you have linked to as "Wasn't That a Mighty Day"
about Galveston 1900) on Nanci Griffith's _Other Voices 2: A
Trip Back to Bountiful_. It has Pete Seeger and Odetta among a
cast of dozens.
"Cruelly if unavoidably, "Walking on Sunshine" by, um . . "
OOH, OOH I know this one, Phillip J. Fry, he's always singing that shit...
Ironically, American Pie:
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.
Alison Krauss' version of "Down in the River to Pray."
I've had "Do You Know What It Means (to Miss New Orleans)" in my head for about a week now....
Nanci Griffith, "Year Down in New Orleans."
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
Sorry, forgot to include the actual link to the lyrics:
>I've had "Do You Know What It Means (to Miss New Orleans)" in my head for about a week now....
Like Tom Whitmore, I've had that as my personal soundtrack for a while now.
When the Levee Breaks and Broken Levee Blues here, Bloodletting too.
And sadly, Death Letter. I just hope my baby won't be lying on the cooling board when this is all over.
Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans has been going through my head since Sunday.
Yup, the Hip and the New Orleans is Sinking song are the soundtrack in my head for the past few days....
Thank you Jim!
I thought I was the only one.
I have the opening song from "The Simpsons" "Oh Streetcar!" episode, "House of the Rising Sun", and "City of New Orleans" fighting it out.
My dad used to call me Katrina so I feel vaguely guilty.
Jim White, "Still Waters". The lyrics don't fit all that well, but Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus uses it as the soundtrack for the opening swamp montage...
I had "When the Levee Breaks" until now, but thanks to this post, I now have "Wade in the Water" stuck in my head.
Walking On Sunshine, by Katrina and the Waves.
in poor taste, i know. but it is a catchy song, and it's stuck in my head.
I see I'm not the only one with City of New Orleans stuck in his head right now, along with House of the Rising Sun.
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.
Katrina And The Waves, now appearing on a double bill with I Am The World Trade Center.
Well, it wasn't until you asked, but Sting "Moon over Bourbon Street"
[And I too have been plagued with "Walking on Sunshine" since I first heard about Katrina as a tropical storm out in the Atlantic.]
[expletive]
I'm going to stop reading this thread now. Apparently y'all have l33t 34r-w0rm 5ki11z.
"When the Levee Breaks." I even Googled it, and learned that it was a Zeppelin song. I was apparently confusing it with "Down in the Flood," the Basement tapes version with The Band.
Oh, and the Talking Heads' Take Me to the River and Sugar's Hoover Dam have been earworms as well.
Well, none of them until I read this post.
But now, Five Feet High and Rising. Definitely.
I've seen some shots of rural devistation that put me in mind of "Get Down River" by the Bottle Rockets:
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.
I have to point out that the song "The City of New Orleans" wasn't written by Arlo Guthrey.
It was penned by Chicago's own folk legend Steve Goodman.
And, yes, they do still play the blues in Chicago...
the two Nanci Griffith songs mentioned ("wasn't that a mighty storm" and "year down in new orleans")are apt. I've had a Cindy Kallet song stuck in my head, "Tide and the River Rising":
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
Still "When the Levee Breaks" here - but you'd expect that, wouldn't you?
Pardon my lurking. I keep thinking of Louis Armstrong's Basin Street Blues, since New Orleans was well on its way to actually becoming a basin.
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
Some When the Levee Breaks, but mostly Five Feet High and Risin' (and, regrettably, Walkin' on Sunshine). And now that I've been reminded of it, Basin Street Blues.
The Bevis Frond, "Flood Warning."
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?
It's been Lucinda Williams' Crescent City for me since Sunday, spurring tears, to the point where I had to link to the mp3 at my blog.
(Click the link that says "slipping into disk jockey mode.")
Offtopic for music,
ontopic for Katrina.
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.
Many waters cannot quench love;
Neither can the floods drown it.
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.
"Well, it's coming up hard on seven here at WTNH, the engineer's giving me the sign that he's gettin' tired of holdin' my chair against the studio ceiling -- I think you know the sign I mean -- and before we close out the night with a complete playthrough of TMBG's Flood -- can I have a shout-out to the automated Topsypopsytron 9000? -- I'd like to say to everybody within the sound of my voice, put the pedal down, dammit."
Call me Pollyanna, but I keep hearing "Octopus's Garden".
They played Randy Newman's Lousiana 1927 (lyrics in first comment) on the radio yesterday, and it was beautiful and disturbing.
SIx feet of water in the steets of Evangeline.
Yep.
And for my choice, I'd go with Jackson Browne's light apocapella ballad, Before The Deluge:
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
"When the Levee Breaks" and "Take Me to the River"
Meta:
Uh, I'm getting a url glitch in my last post. Properties show the correct link to boingboing, but when I click on it, it goes to microsoft...? Did I do something inappropriate?
wil
Oh, and I've had "Take Me to the River" in my head for days now.
More Meta spam.
The flaw in my first post on this board is as follows:
http://http//www.example.net is resolved:
http://www.microsoft.com
The net only knows why.
Obiwil:
http://http//www.example.net is resolved:
http://www.microsoft.com
The net only knows why.
I've got a new one playing now, "Mommy Daddy You & I" from Naked (you'll have to scroll down):
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 IDriving, 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 coldCrawling 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.
I still hear the BS&T arrangement of "Down in the flood" when I see those lyrics, but am mostly hearing lots of Louis Armstrong tunes in my head.
Michael Croft:
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”."
Actually, I've been dealing with either the Slade or Great Big Sea versions of 'Run Runaway' as earworms for the past few days.
Just so you know, "When The Levee Breaks" was actually written by Memphis Minnie, not Led Zep. Here's the original mp3.
(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.
"City of New Orleans," irrelevant as it is.
Zvi: well picked.
The Hip's New Orleans Is Sinking is, as everyone knows, the best song in the known universe.
Dan MacQueen - They were playing "City of New Orleans" in the grocery today; it's been going through my head since then too.
And, don't forget, the Talking Heads merely covered "Take Me to the River," originally penned and recorded by Reverend Al Green.
(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.)
the Presto movement from Beethoven's symphony #6, and Enya's "Storms in Africa".
Some odd combination of Flood I & Flood II, Sisters of Mercy.
...and I didn't have that particular earworm before reading this thread, so I hate you all... :)
I found an MP3 of the Kansas Joe "When The Levee Breaks."
Spirit of the West, "When Rivers Rise"
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".
For me, it's been "Here Comes the Flood" back and forth with Brian Eno's "By This River":
Here we are
Stuck by this river,
You and I
Underneath a sky that's ever falling down, down, down
Ever falling downThrough 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.
I've had "When the Levee Breaks" (Zeplin) and "Ain't that a Shame" (Fats Domino).
My man has had "Bridge over Troubled Water" as done by Johhny Cash. Accordingly it is being used in a commercial by the Red Cross.
I wrote: "Octopus's Garden"
And I can't unwrite it, but believe me I'm missing New Orleans now.
Flick, who really should know better, offers
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..."
"Busted Levee Blues"
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
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