‘Seminole Wind’ reflects a conservative disposition about how to steward the earth and her resources that doesn’t fit neatly into left or right.
Most people have a favorite song — that one tune you’ll happily listen to almost anytime, anywhere. For someone who doesn’t fancy himself a music expert, I’m not sure I could pinpoint a single favorite song, but I can surely name a few.
I do have one song that, without fail, takes me back to my childhood. That song is “Seminole Wind,“ by John Anderson, the country music legend who died yesterday at the age of 71.
My father played that song every day on his way to drop my brother, my sister, and me off at elementary school. I remember vividly sitting in the back of his Infiniti sedan on cold leather seats — no seat warmers — as Anderson serenaded us in the drop-off line. Today, I’m transported back to that time in my life whenever my Spotify shuffle chooses “Seminole Wind.”
The title song was released in 1992, eleven years before I was born, and breathed new life into Anderson’s career. It tells the story of the destruction of the Florida Everglades and the plundering of the natural landscape — the ancestral land of the Seminole tribe — for economic gain. The tune is heavy on the fiddle and melancholy, invoking the ghost of legendary Seminole tribe leader Chief Osceola, weeping over what developers have done to the Everglades.
It is said that a visit to his mother prompted Anderson to write and record the song. He grew up in Apopka, Fla., north of the Everglades.
The tune reads like a conservationist’s treatise, lamenting the human desire to extract wealth from the ground, environment be damned. The song begins: Ever since the days of old / Men would search for wealth untold / They’d dig for silver and for gold / And leave the empty holes.
Anderson’s second verse starts out in a way that might strike some as oxymoronic: And progress came and took its toll / And in the name of flood control / They made their plans and they drained the land / Now the glades are going dry.
But to a conservative, “Progress came and took its toll” is a familiar sentiment.
Somebody who views progress, however vague the definition, as an unassailable good might balk at the line. How can progress come with a cost? Doubting the sanctity of linear progress is, well, conservatism, at its most foundational level. And Anderson’s invocation of government planning “in the name of flood control” evokes the typical folly of unforeseen or overlooked consequences — all in the name of progress. Everything comes with a cost or trade-off.
I don’t know what Anderson’s politics were, nor do I feel the need or desire to find out. But if “Seminole Wind” is indicative of anything, it reflects a deeply conservative disposition about the way to steward the earth and her resources that, today, may not fit so neatly in boxes of left or right.
Above all, Anderson loved music and the Florida swamp — two things he hoped would resist over-commodification and the sacrifice of their soul. RIP.