Song Premiere: Eric Brace, Peter Cooper & Thomm Jutz’ “Drowned and Washed Away” From Upcoming Album

Listen & Watch Song Premieres

Americana Highways is pleased to premiere this track, “Drowned and Washed Away,” from Eric Brace, Peter Cooper & Thomm Jutz’s forthcoming album Riverland (Red Beet Records). The trio produced the album which is due out on February 1, 2019.  Riverland recounts lyrical stories about the Mississippi River and the experiences — both wonderful and harrowing — of living on its shores.

In “Drowned and Washed Away,” and indeed over the entire album, following the tradition of all the greatest storytelling songwriters, Brace, Cooper & Jutz have woven a stirring tapestry of abject trauma over haunting, understated musical intricacy.  With the trinity of acoustic guitars, rhythm section Mark Fain and Lynn Williams, and the layered accoutrements of Mike Compton on mandolin, Tammy Rogers on fiddle and Justin Moses on banjo, the music carries the song through subtle sophistication. The chorus: “Now here’s a river fifty miles wide, took my reason to stay, look over yonder, you can’t see the other side, drowned and washed away” sends vicarious chills of terror as the listener is awash in the emotions that accompany witnessing that kind of natural disaster.

In 1927 the Mississippi flooded to an extent no one could have predicted or believed possible. At one point the river south of Memphis was sixty miles wide (a fact learned in John M. Barry’s astonishing book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. We wondered about the sharecropper who watched his entire existence vanish before his eyes. This is his story. — Eric Brace
Give it a listen, right here:

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