Randy Newman's "Louisiana"

Wow, what a beautiful song (I was watching the "Shelter From the Storm" telethon this evening on TV). Like the Robert Frost poem I quoted a few days ago, it's apparently about the 1927 flood.

The full lyrics are here, but perhaps the lines that seem most poignant today are these:

What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The President say, "Little fat man isn't it a shame what the river has
done
To this poor cracker's land."

Now, I don't know about that last line, but the bit about the President and his man with the note-pad seem dead-on.