MERCY IN THE STORM

Hear the baby
Cryin’ for his momma
Momma's gone
There's panic in the waters
Of the Glades

There's a black cloud
Comin’ like a freight train
Dark as spit
Terror in the hammer of the rain

The levy walls are bending with a vengeance
The water in Lake Okeechobee's rising high
The tambourines are ringing
Like a Sunday morning choir
And the people cry
Mercy in the storm

Where's my brother
Where's my little sister
Stacked like cordwood
Throw ‘em in the bottom of a hole

There's a white man
Sleeping in a pine box
Preacher laying flowers
At the blessing of his soul

The levy walls are bending with a vengeance
The water in Lake Okeechobee's rising high
The tambourines are ringing
Like a Sunday morning choir
And the people cry
Mercy in the storm

The white man cries
The white man prays
The white man lives to see another day
The black man dies
The black man drowns
The black man buries thousands
Face down in the ground
The people cry mercy in the storm

Stuck in NOLA
Waiting for Katrina
Mayor says it's bad
We gotta hit the road

In the 9th Ward
Ain't no buses
Got no car
Got nothin’ but the
Mercy of the Lord

The levee walls are bending with a vengeance
The water in Lake Pontchartrain is rising high
The tambourines are ringing
Like a Sunday morning choir
And the people cry
Mercy in the storm

The white man cries
The white man prays
The white man lives to see another day
The black man dies
The black man drowns
The black man buries thousands
Face down in the ground
The people cry
Mercy in the storm

As a songwriter, one thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that you never know when or how inspiration will arrive in your mental inbox. The inspiration for Mercy in the Storm came from an unusual source for me–from a piece of art in the form of a sculpture.

A companion and I were strolling the grounds of the Storm King Art Center in Hudson Valley, New York. Stacked on a peninsula extending into a lake were two towers of tambourines, perhaps 30’ high and painted white. It was a sculpture by a young New York artist whose name is Allison Janae Hamilton. The sculpture is entitled "The peo-ple cried mercy in the storm.” The title is a lyric from a song called “Florida Storm” by Judge Jackson which became popular in 1928 following the Okeechobee Hurricane. That storm killed 5000 black migrant farm workers when the levies of Lake Okeechobee breached, and is reported to be the second deadliest hurricane in US history. So many people died that they couldn’t be buried. The few white people who died were properly buried. As I was contemplating the stack of tambourines, I started thinking about Hurricane Katrina and the similarities between Okeechobee and what happened in New Orleans 77 years later when the levies of Lake Pontchartrain breached. There it was, the inescapable trifecta of systemic racism, climate change and those tambourines representing the role of folk music in building resilience in an oppressed culture. This was subject matter for a song. Allison reminded me in an email that it was a song that inspired the sculpture and now, full circle, the sculpture inspired a song.

I like the instrumentation in this song. Clark’s mandolin style evokes a rhythm and tone of the “tambourines ringing like a Sunday morning choir” and Graham’s electric guitar creates a distinctly southern blues vibe that transports the listener to another place and time.