Song Of The Day – “Five Feet High And Rising” by Johnny Cash

Song of the Day by Eric Berman

Here’s another one for family and friends on the East Coast who are enduring the big storm. While Sandy blows through your town, I hope you are hangin’ tight with enough food, water, booze and most importantly, electricity! While “Frankenstorm” is indeed a force of nature not to be messed with, so was Johnny Cash, and here’s a song that may cut a little too close to the bone for you all back east. This autobiographical account of a flood the Cash family endured on their Arkansas farm when Johnny was a child first appeared on the 1959 album “Songs Of The Soil.” With spare boom-chicka-boom accompaniment, a repetitive chorus and a modulation in key every time the flood waters of the song rise, Cash manages to capture the drama of a devastating event in song.

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