#16 Daughter Of The Everglades

 

Album: Blueprint, 1973

See also: BBC Sessions, 1999

 

The mind might boggle when looking at the extensive touring schedule of Rory Gallagher (the dates being preserved historically online and also noted daily on his social media) at how he managed to fit in the time to write and record new material. But manage it he did.

Songs could come to him while noodling about on guitar, or at random moments, for which he carried around a notebook. One such memorable occasion has already been recounted in a previous entry to this series when Rory got separated from his brother Dónal during a walk along the Ballycotton Cliffs and sat down to write down some lyrics that came to him, as Dónal’s calls to him went unheeded. When the inspiration hits, it hits!

In the case of ‘Daughter Of The Everglades’. Rory drew inspiration from a book he had read. The song appears on ‘Blueprint’, released on February 18, 1973. It’s quite unusual, with a strong folky feel and almost a touch of the Southern Gothic. One way to describe it is that it is a novel in a song. It’s not the only track of this nature on ‘Blueprint’, the other being ‘Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son’.

If anything, ‘Blueprint’ seems to mark a point in which Rory was taking his songwriting further into the depths of his imagination, as well as finding inspiration in the presence of new bandmates, including the addition of pianist Lou Martin as the fourth part to Rory’s previous trio setups. In his notes on ‘Blueprint’, Dónal writes that ‘Daughter Of The Everglades’ ‘highlights Lou’s contribution to the band’. Switching drummers from Wilgar Campbell to Rod de’Ath following the former no longer being able to carry on with Rory’s tour schedule, also switched things around in Rory’s sound. ‘Daughter Of The Everglades’ is certainly proof of that, Rod’s drumming having both an uncanny and earthy element. It would be curious to be a time-traveling fly on the wall to see it all come together at the recording sessions of December 1972 at the Polydor and Marquee Studios in London.

The sound certainly sets the scene. When you listen to ‘Daughter Of The Everglades’, it feels as if you are being transported to the cinema at some point in the earlier half of the 20^th century to see a brilliant but slightly forgotten movie set in the rural American southern states in which, a love story plays out. And the lyrics punch home the remarkable character of the Daughter who Rory’s first-person protagonist falls in love with:

"Well, you looked like your mama
Before you walked, you swam
Learned to makes snake tails stew
From your daddy, a crazy talkin' fisherman
In this place there is no law; the river makes all the rules
What they are I found out
When I came back to look for you."

But while winning his heart, there is also an inexplicable supernatural element that strikes fear into Rory’s character, yet he can’t pull away:

"Daughter of the Everglades
Why did you bring me here?
Daughter of the Everglades
My love has turned to fear
Child of the river
Let me feel you near."

 The lyrics also describe a habitat ‘where the river makes all the rules’. There is a certain mysticism to be found around places like environments such as the Everglades, an area unique to Florida. The Everglades is in the southern tip of Florida, forming a 1.5 million acre wetland that is a national park. Even the generic Google description of the place as a ‘slow-moving river’ with marshes, pine Flatwoods, mangroves, and all sorts of fauna from leatherback turtles, manatees, and the Florida panther smacks of the ethereal. Add to that, it’s the largest subtropical wilderness in the US, so there is plenty of scope for the imagination to run, as Rory’s certainly did. He even describes strange noises and eyes hidden peeking out from the reeds.

The eponymous Daughter also comes across more like a genius loci, or spirit of the place, her nature mirroring that of the Everglades. In the song, she’s taken miles away to live in a city, the result (or peril) of falling in love. But away from the Everglades, she seems to wither and, in the end, disappears, eventually tracked back by her lover to the Everglades. But it’s not good news for him when he gets there and asks her whereabouts, ‘But they tell me you have drowned.’