Sometimes it just makes sense.
Great Big Yam is all about the picnics and harvests. Rural music from rural people.
Great Big Yam is a collective and individual effort to preserve traditional American music and create songs within that tradition. From the traveling blues to the banjo breakdown to the jigs and reels native to Ireland to the African roots to folk protest songs.
Story behind the song
Many times the best advice is to cut and run. Say, when nothing but bad things can happen as a result of your endeavors. There's a reason the phrase exists in the first place.
Lyrics
When I was a boy, just 10 years old
Grandma took me down to the fishing hole
Baited my hook and then cast out the line.
Right away I said “This fish is pretty big,”
turns out I got 30 pounds of twig
And it turns out it wasn’t going to be the last time…
It was a quagmire,
bogged down,
long hard slog out on the pond.
She turned to me, said,
“Son,
Sometimes you just have to cut bait and run—
unless you want to lose the whole pole.”
I grew up quick & later in life
the debts kept raining and the creek did rise
I was running out of options,
worse yet, I was running in place.
Ran up all my credit cards
the city fined me for not cutting the yard
I was found around town walking around
with egg all over my face…
A bona-fide fiasco.
Loaded up the car that night,
sent the landlord my regrets.
Then I watched a bunch of people in the Superdome
weather forced them to flee their homes
in Algiers, Gentilly and the Lower Ninth.
Not noticing that they were black,
they asked a man when could they go back,
The man said “Maybe when the water ain’t so high.”
So a year it comes & a year it goes
and most of them they still don’t know
when they’ll ever get a chance to see
Their friends and their old neighborhoods
The answer, I’m afraid, it ain’t that good
Because cuttin’ and runnin’s our official policy—
Don’t want to get caught in the middle
of a civil war in New Orleans—
It’s a slam dunk!
Bob Woodward’ll tell you so himself.
Out in my yard some time last night
I felt prey to tricks of the light
that clearly showed my dog’s tail waggin’ him.
I watched him for a half an hour
he made me privy to the levers of power,
the same ones since we wiped out the Indians.
If lucre and plunder isn’t your thing
and if you find yourself intent upon playing
some kind of role in the democratic charade,
When someone tells you to stay the course
You tell him, “All right, but I’m changing the horse,
The reeds are deep and I believe I will cut bait.”
