4 of the Most Memorable Songs About Natural Disasters, Both Real and Imagined

Songwriting has long been a vehicle for summarizing historical accounts, whether in the traditional folk sense, like Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane”, or in rock ‘n’ roll, like Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water”. We’ve also used music to remember and heal from natural disasters, which can feel overwhelming, confusing, and jarring from our humanistic vantage point in Mother Nature’s domain.

Here are four of the most memorable songs about natural disasters that actually happened (and one that was, at the time of its recording, still an imagined fear and not yet a reality for the songwriter).

“When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is a remake of Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s 1929 song about the Mississippi Flood of 1927. The natural disaster affected over 27,000 square miles, with much of the damage centralized in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Well over half a million were impacted by the flood, and over 600 people died. Led Zeppelin brought the story back to the mainstream on their untitled fourth album from 1971.

“Five Feet High And Rising” by Johnny Cash

Ten years after the Mississippi Flood, the Ohio River flooded from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois. Fewer people died in the 1937 flood than in the one ten years prior, but this natural disaster still wreaked havoc across the river valley. Johnny Cash immortalized the impact the flood had on his own family in his 1959 track, “Five Feet High And Rising”. Cash was just shy of five years old at the time.

“L.A. Woman” by The Doors

The Doors’ catalogue was full of songs where the narrator, in this case, Jim Morrison, is singing to a woman by the time the band released L.A. Woman. However, the album’s title track differed in that the “woman” in question was a metaphor for California. Lines like, “I see your hair is burning, hills are filled with fire,” were Morrison’s way of describing the wildfires that sprang up across the Coast Range.

“California Shake” by Margo Guryan

Unlike the previous three tracks, Margo Guryan’s “California Shake” wasn’t about a specific natural disaster but rather the threat of one. Having moved to the West Coast from New York City, the imminent threat of earthquakes in California frightened Guryan. In an attempt to “make light of that fear,” per Genius, she likened the earthquakes to a statewide, synchronized dance. The song appeared on 27 Demos from 2014, but the songs dated back to the 1960s.

Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns