Cajun Flood

I wrote this song to teach myself something about mandolin. I fear that any real mandolin player will hear me and say, "Now there's a novice!" That confession aside, the song tells the story of a big storm blowing into the bayou and flooding out a parish-full of Cajuns, who treat the whole mess as an excuse to have a party. I guess Louise's line, as they float out to sea, sums up the spirit in many Southerners that I most admire: "Pass the wine and try to hurry/All this water's made me thirsty." No matter how bad life gets, a few make the best of things and somehow manage to retain a sense of humor. That seems especially true of Cajuns. After floating all the way from Canada to Louisiana, what's a few more miles to the Gulf? The end of the song repeats the early refrain, "S'il pleur tous les jours, je m'en fou " The song concludes with the theme from "Okeefenokee", which, I suppose is my attempt to tie together the beginning and end of my dreambook - the inner chapters bounded by a preface, "Invocation", and epilogue, "Lullaby for Ruth".

I borrowed Julia's wonderful old A-style mandolin for this song. Roy Laird does a mean clawhammer track and Julia does some fine Cajun fiddle. I play a bit of spotty acoustic guitar here and there. Rayleigh Rask played and recorded the penny whistle at his home. The tracks start getting weird once the Cajuns sail out into the ocean. John Toebbe is furiously beating a cajun triangle while I'm furiously beating out hambone on my chest. John Magnie starts providing some oceanic ambiance on accordian. The sun comes out, finally, and Craig Meadows and I start in with the cowbell bouy just as Sean starts to bow his foghorn bass and Scott joins in on cello. We tried all sorts of things to get a bouy sound and finally settled on a very large Revereware pot with a cowbell submerged in about two inches of water. I would slosh the water around while Craig hit the cowbell.

Just about everybody who sings on this CD, sings on this song: Eloisa, John Toebbe, Tom Gould, Scott, Jennifer, Julia, me doing about four tracks: it was a minor nightmare for poor Mark, the engineer, but he somehow mixed the mess together. I don't know what else to say except, "Salute the cajuns and anybody anywhere who can float his or her way out of troubles."