Elk River Blues - The Littlest Birds

Recorded live at Moonlight on the Mountain in Birmingham, Alabama, 11/24/2013
Elk River Blues is a fiddle tune by Ernie Carpenter who wrote as he watched the Army Corps of Engineers flood his home. This tune is dedicated to all those who have been displaced. You can find another version of it on The Littlest Birds self-titled debut album.
Composing notes from Sharon: Some friends in Oregon played this tune for me and I fell in love with it. I love the minor, haunting melody. The song struck even more of a chord for me when I dug up the story behind it. Ernie Carpenter was a farmer in West Virginia. The Army Corp of Engineers decided to dam the Elk River, flooding the valley where’s Ernie’s family had farmed. Ernie wrote this tune, watching his home disappear. He spent his last years rambling around, never at home again. I hope he doesn’t mind that I found words, and changed the tune just a bit. It is a bittersweet story, but it made me also acknowledge that all of this land was taken from the people who lived here before me. This song dedicated to all people who are forcibly removed from their homes. I recorded this on my grandpa’s 1800’s Washburn banjo—my first banjo ever.
lyrics
Music by Ernie Carpenter
Words by Sharon Martinson

You dam my river
You flood my farm
You dam my river
You flood my home
I've got no other place I can go to
So forever will I roam.

The water is rising
The birds are flying
They're trying to get
To higher ground
I've got no other place I can go to
So forever will I roam.

*We took this land
From all its people
We took these people
From their land
They’ve got no other
Place they can go to
So forever will they roam
*new, unrecorded verse