I’ve been writing a series of blogs on the songs that make up my most recent release, a covers project entitled “Through Songs I Was First Undone.”  The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this album have been sacred moments. These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God and humanity.

Here is part one of why Tom Waits’ “Georgia Lee” is on the album:

My first knowledge of Tom Waits actually came by way of Primus; a band I listened to incessantly as a teenager.  Wait’s appears on Primus’ dark and quirky 1991 release “Sailing The Seas of Cheese.” He is featured on a track entitled “Tommy The Cat” as the voice of Tommy, who is, of course, a cat.  Interesting bit of trivia: Primus backs Waits on the opening track to “Mule Variations,” the same album from which we get the song “Georgia Lee.”

Waits wrote Georgia Lee with his wife, Kathleen after the body of 12-year old Georgia Lee Moses was found off Highway 101 in Petaluma, CA, just north of San Francisco.  Discovered on Aug 23, 1997, Georgia had run away and was missing for over two weeks before her absence was noticed; a more common occurrence in low-income or impoverished areas.  In fact, just four years earlier, the absence of Polly Klaas, a 12-year old girl from an upper middle class neighborhood in the same county as Georgia Moses, had stirred outrage and action nationwide.  Major celebrities and news outlets committed hours of time to finding her.  Polly’s kidnapper and eventual murderer was arrested and is now on death row.  The man who killed Georgia was never found.

“Not to make it a racial matter,” Waits said “but it was one of those things where, you know, she’s a black kid, and when it comes to missing children and unsolved crimes, a lot of it has to do with timing, or publicity . . . and there was this whole Polly Klaas Foundation up here, while Georgia Lee did not get any real attention.  And I wanted to write a song about it.”

Road-Side Monument for Georgia Lee in Petaluma, CA

I don’t at all mean to belittle the time and energy spent searching for, mourning and remembering Polly Klaas.  Nor do I believe Waits intended to do so.  Quite the opposite in fact; that a child goes missing from their home or neighborhood should be cause for all regularly-scheduled programming to pause.. any child…

And perhaps it was simply “to do with timing” that there was so much attention paid to the finding of one child, while another child’s absence and death can be simply read as the lay of the land. I’m not suggesting that media attention is the most accurate measure of our concern for life but the nightly news is at least some reflection of collective consciousness; some reflection of what things are of value to us;  what things we are watching, listening to and present to.

A year after services were held, Waits is quoted as saying about the service “I guess everybody was wondering, where were the police, where was the deacon, where were the social workers, and where was I and where were you.”

So while it might not be CNN or FOX or even the local paper, it has to be someone, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what our hearts demand?.. that someone is watching, someone is listening, someone is there for the other child? for every child?

“Where were her parents?  What kind of parent allows their child to run away and doesn’t call the police?” we ask.  All the while knowing that parents are not always good parents; sometimes parents are only children themselves, as Wait’s writes:  “A lot of kids are raising their parents.”

“So, If not her parents,” we concede “then what about her neighbors?  What kind of neighborhood lets one of it’s little ones simply disappear?”  At which my own heart sinks because I do not know the names of children who live only a few units away from me.

What kind of world is it, then, in which the in the foundational institutions set in place to facilitate the development of young life so consistently fail?

This progression of questions about the broken nature of things leads us to the One whose world it is… or at least to the places we expect to find Him.  The SF Chronicle reported that Waits attended Georgia Moses’ memorial service, “sitting quietly at the back of the crowded church.”

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there?

If not the news networks, the families or the neighbors.. If not the world He made, then must not God Himself protect the most vulnerable among us?

Part 2 coming shortly…

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes