For the next Song of the Day during Flood Month, we advance to 1937, another year of very high water along the Lower Mississippi. While the human tragedy didn’t reach the levels of the flood ten years earlier, flood waters covered an area the size of Lake Superior, with communities along the Ohio River hit the hardest. Waters were so high around Cairo, Illinois in 1937 that the Army Corps of Engineers blew up a levee to flood farmland in the New Madrid Floodway (a decision they wouldn’t have to make again until 2011).
While the 1937 flood didn’t inspire as many songs as the 1927 event, it was enough to motivate blues pioneer Lonnie Johnson to write Flood Water Blues. Johnson was no stranger to flood songs, penning three songs about the 1927 Mississippi River flood: South Bound Water, The New Fallin’ Rain Blues, and Broken Levee Blues. In Flood Water Blues, Johnson sings about the psychological toll of a flood.
Listen to more songs here.
