Glen Campbell News

Chuck Berry yearned for Baton Rouge, The Band headed for Lake Charles and Glen Campbell was homesick for Galveston when he cleaned his gun.

Pick a place pounded by the twin hurricanes that ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast over the last month, and there is probably a popular song to go with it.

That is a reflection not only of the storms' broad reach, but also of the rich influence exerted by the Gulf region -- with its swampy mix of jazz, rock n' roll, Cajun music, country and blues -- on American music.

The jazz city of New Orleans, which was flooded by last month's Hurricane Katrina and again by Hurricane Rita over the weekend, has long been enshrined in song.

"House of the Rising Sun," about lost virtue in a brothel, is among the most famous. The traditional tune with a 17th century British melody was first recorded in 1928 by blues singer Texas Alexander. It became a folk music staple and was put on the rock map by the British band "The Animals."

Galveston, Texas, wiped out in the deadliest U.S. hurricane ever in 1900 but spared when Rita changed direction, sparked the imagination of Jimmy Webb when he wrote what became one of Glen Campbell's biggest hits.

"I still hear your sea waves crashing, while I watch the cannons flashing, I clean my gun and dream of Galveston," Campbell sings.

Chuck Berry listed Baton Rouge, Louisiana's capital, buffeted by Rita, among the places he yearned for in a 1959 homecoming song, "Back in the U.S.A." The song inspired The Beatles' political parody, "Back in the U.S.S.R."

"Looking hard for a drive in, searching for a corner cafe, where the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day," Berry sang of his American vision.

Janis Joplin sang of being "busted flat in Baton Rouge," in "Me and Bobby McGee," a traveling song written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster. Joplin was born in Port Arthur, Texas, a town smack in Rita's weekend path.

The Band, a Canadian-American group, scored its biggest hit with "Up on Cripple Creek," in which the singer vows to travel down the Mississippi River to find a tempestuous charmer, "little Bessie," in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The town was one of the hardest-hit by Rita's blast.

Finally there is Randy Newman's 1974 tune, "Louisiana 1927," which recalls an earlier flood with a poignant chorus that has become a widely used theme for this year's calamities: "Louisiana, Louisiana, they're trying to wash us away, they're trying to wash us away."