Seminole Wind

Sad news received last night that country singer and songwriter John Anderson has died at 71.

Anderson had one of the most distinctive voices in the genre, a voice that Trigger at Saving Country Music described as:

…like caramel being run through a volume pedal. 

I believe that my first exposure to John Anderson was his rendition of Billy Joe Shaver’s I’m Just An Old Lump of Coal. From a Frontier Partisans standpoint, though, his most powerful work was and will always be his own Seminole Wind, an elegy to his home state of Florida that evokes the ghost of the Seminole rebel Osceola.

A masterpiece on every level.

Ever since the days of old
Men would search for wealth untold
They’d dig for silver and for gold
And leave the empty holes

And way down south in the Everglades
Where the black water rolls and the saw grass waves
The eagles fly and the otters play in the land of the Seminole

So blow, blow Seminole wind
Blow like you’re never gonna blow again
I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend
But I know who you are
And blow, blow from the Okeechobee
All the way up to Micanopy
Blow across the home of the Seminole
The alligators and the gar

And progress came and took its toll
And in the name of flood control
They made their plans and they drained the land
Now the glades are going dry

And the last time I walked in the swamp
I sat upon a Cypress stump
I listened close, and I heard the ghost of Osceola cry

So blow, blow Seminole wind
Blow like you’re never gonna blow again
I’m calling to you like a long-lost friend
But I know who you are
And blow, blow from the Okeechobee
All the way up to Micanopy
Blow across the home of the Seminole
The alligators and the gar

May that Seminole Wind blow him home…