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- The Observer, Sunday August 12 2007
1. Tupelo, John Lee Hooker
The floods that devastated the Mississippi in 1927 have inspired a raft of awesome songs, among them Charley Patton's 'High Water Everywhere', Memphis Minnie's 'When the Levee Breaks' (later borrowed by Led Zeppelin) and Randy Newman's 'Louisiana 1927'. The floods cost tens of thousands of lives and made one per cent of the US population homeless (as this shot of Greenville's Walnut and Main Streets illustrates). As with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there were accusations of presidential indifference to the suffering.
Written in 1959, and delivered in a voice the colour of river mud, Hooker's talking blues evokes the relentless fall of rain with a one-chord guitar and a tappin' foot, while he quietly laments the 'women and children crying'.
Whether Britain's floods provoke a similar swathe of songs is doubtful, but it's perhaps no coincidence that the nation's favourite song has been Rihanna's 'Umbrella', where 'it's raining more than ever'.
2. Bad Moon Rising, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Weather forecasts don't come any nastier: 'I hear hurricanes a-blowing ... Don't go around tonight, it's bound to take your life.' Was John Fogerty singing about his Vietnam experiences, or worrying about Nixon?
3. Dust Bowl Ballads, Woody Guthrie
The ecological devastation of mid-America in the 1930s - caused largely by intensive farming - was witnessed by Guthrie at first hand. In 1940 he cut a dozen sides describing the mass displacement, illness and injustice that resulted with dry but compassionate wit.
4. Jamaica Hurricane, Lord Beginner
In 2004 reggae star Anthony B responded to Hurricane Ivan hitting Jamaica with a charity single. Fifty years before, Trinidadian calypso king Beginner did much the same at a gentler, jazzier pace, and sang of the 100-mph winds causing a mass jailbreak.
5. Six-Year Drought, James Mcmurtry
A tale from the 'redneck intellectual' about the social fallout of freakish weather, here the drought of south-west USA. The song's narrator is a plains drifter in a run-down town - 'I'm just a visitor here, the drought won't hurt me none.'
6. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Gordon Lightfoot
In 1976 this Canadian songwriter (of 'Early Morning Rain' renown) bagged a huge hit with his ballad of the Great Lakes ore carrier sunk with the loss of all 29 crew - 'when the gales of November came slashing'.
7. Cler Achel, Tinariwen
The Tuareg instigators of desert blues have their roots in the droughts of the southern Sahara in the 1970s and 1980s, and which, amid political turmoil, led to a mass Tuareg exile. Arid, clanking guitars conjure miles of sand, vocals ache with homesickness.
8. Chimes of Freedom, Bob Dylan
Dylan and pal duck into a church doorway to escape a sudden downpour. The storm becomes a vision of universal humanity, in which 'bells of lightning' chime for 'the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked'. Rippling with elemental images.
9. The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine (Anymore), The Walker Brothers
Not content with stormy clouds to describe getting dumped, this 1966 tune calls down a nuclear winter of despair. No girl = no sun, no moon. It was written for Frankie Valli, but Scott's symphony scored the hit.
10. Heat Wave, Martha and The Vandellas
Weather as emotion. Martha Reeves's gospel vocals testify to an invigorating cocktail of hot weather, high blood pressure and fever-pitch passion. As Cole Porter noted, it's too darn hot.
