Hurricanes are coming, earlier each year, more are on the way, no-one doubts it. Those living in their paths no longer pray for rain but for its absence, hoping against hope that they won’t face the same fate as Western North Carolina did last year. Though hurricanes can affect nearly anywhere in the eastern half of the country, the vast majority of hurricanes that make landfall in the US do so in the South. For that reason, we might also expect these storms to be a frequent subject for country music, as concerned as that genre is with regional experiences. But as dedicated country listeners know, hurricanes appear relatively infrequently in the genre. When they do, it is usually as metaphor, as in Luke Comb’s “Hurricane” (2016), in which the titular storm stands in for the emotional devastation wrought by the narrator’s ex-girlfriend. “Hurricane” (2024) by The Castellows—a cover of Leon Everette’s 1981 hit—is an outlier for being about an actual storm. Released well before the deadly 2024 hurricane season, their resuscitation of this song nevertheless provides an interesting window into both the genre’s climate imaginary and the hurricane seasons yet to come.

Weather is an integral part of country music’s symbolic vocabulary—thunderstorms and tornados make regular appearances, but rain is by far the most frequent. This is not surprising, since rain is the enabling condition for the rural lifestyle that forms the foundation of the genre. Country is, after all, a genre structured around a fantasy of white rural life, one that arose at the historical moment this life began to disappear along with the small farms and agricultural employment that had formed its material basis.¹ Whenever rain appears in country music, it indexes both the tenuousness and persistence of the small farm. Take, for example, Jason Aldean’s “Amarillo Sky” (2005), in which an old farmer, beset by hardship, plows the fields and asks God to preserve his family’s farm and the only life he’s ever known. Rain is the unspoken subject of the farmer’s prayer, the force that both makes farm life possible and serves as the reward for the farmer’s unwavering dedication to that lifestyle. Though less heartfelt, Luke Bryan’s “Rain is a Good Thing” (2010) is equally clear about the importance of rain. The song celebrates a forecasted rainstorm because “rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey, whiskey makes my baby feel a little frisky.” Here, the weather underwrites both literal reproduction and the reproduction of rural life—as Amarillo Sky puts it, rain makes both “crops and children grow.”² To pray for rain is to pray, not for any single harvest, but for the continuation of an entire way of life.

Throughout country music, rain takes on quasi-magical properties of generation, an association that has a long history in western stereotypes of rain dances, fertility ceremonies, and other misappropriations of Indigenous practices. But the relationship between rain and prayer in these songs also signals the extent to which the farmer is enmeshed in his environment. Weather patterns form a harmonious cycle in which the farmer participates and of which his prayers are but a part. People pray for rain but also know the rain intimately, and their prayers are a sign of connection to nature, growth, and reproduction. This ritualistic aspect of country life relies on a certain degree of repetition and predictability, the promise that prayers will usually be answered.

“Hurricane,” however, is not set on a farm but in New Orleans, and does not feature prayers for rain but preparations for a storm. The song describes the city preparing for a hurricane—“shrimp boats comin’ home,” people nervously discussing flood prevention measures—until an old man in the French Quarter assures the narrator that there is nothing to worry about. Hurricanes come every year, he reminds his listeners, and this one will pass over without trouble. After all, it “takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans.” Despite the urban location of the song, the old man stands in as an embodiment of the local meteorological knowledge typical of the country genre—he was “born in the rain on the Pontchartrain” and thus represents a meeting of rain and tides reminiscent of a hurricane itself. Like the farmers of the country tradition, he has an intimate connection to the elements, and he carries that rural foundation with him into the urban setting of the Quarter. He can thus speak as an emissary of that knowledge, dispensing wisdom to the song’s narrator and its listeners.

Given the old man’s position as a source of local folk knowledge, we might expect him to have something useful to say about climate change. At least, that is the prevailing wisdom. According to popular environmental justice discourses, “frontline and fenceline communities” —those living in flood zones, fire-prone areas, and the paths of storms—not only have the most at stake in fighting climate change, but also have unique insights to offer in that fight.³ These communities have first-hand knowledge of the impacts of climate change and an intimate sense of what has been and is still being lost. Meanwhile, the survival practices fostered by marginalized communities might offer strategies for surviving catastrophe and alternate modes of relationship to the natural world. Here is the wisdom we need as the “high black waters” of climate collapse rise all around us. When the old man speaks, we should all listen.

In this song, however, the world this local knowledge gives us is truly a world turned on its head. All the nameless old man can tell us about hurricanes is that they “come around every June” —storms are no catastrophe, but as regular and welcome as rain, and anyone concerned about them must be bordering on hysterical. Yet it is this very sense of normality, so common to country music that it would normally pass unnoticed, that makes this song so striking in the present context. The old man’s assertion that hurricanes are a normal part of life, while superficially true, ignores the fact that storms are becoming more intense and arriving earlier each year. Normal weather patterns no longer hold; to insist otherwise is climate denial. The song maintains country’s long association between rain and repetition, weather and cyclicality, but in so doing it denies the realities of climate change, insisting against all evidence that everything remains the same. But, like all climate denial, the old man’s advice is based on a fantasy: the predictable world he describes is already long gone. In a time when 100-year weather events are becoming a yearly phenomenon, this instinct to board up the windows and ride it out as we have always done is going to end up with a lot of people dead.

Not every character in the song is quite so nonchalant. In the song’s second verse, an engineer from Chicago attempts to repair the city’s aging levees, but he is quickly written off by the old man. According to the logic of the song, climate mitigation is an outside imposition foisted on communities by ignorant yankees. By presenting the levees as an unnecessary burden that the community must reject, the song positions the breakdown of public infrastructure—collapsing levees, decaying bridges, crumbling roads—not as a constraint imposed by decades of stagnation and crisis, but as the will of the proletariat itself manifested in the built environment. If we don’t have levees, it’s because we didn’t want them in the first place. The song also transforms the nation’s abandonment of poor frontline communities, represented here by the engineer’s swift departure northward,⁴ into a sort of positive localist self-sufficiency. Those Chicago boys might need climate mitigation, but we down here in the South know better. It’s climate denial with a touch of hometown pride.

The song’s setting of New Orleans is a majority Black city that is more strongly associated with Black musical genres like Jazz and Gospel than it is with country. While the old man’s racial identity is never explicitly stated, the setting and a number of other details in the song call his identity into question. The fact that he is frequently identified with the land may be an attempt to hint at indigeneity, while the Quarter, where the man sits in the street with his whiskey bottle, was historically a Creole enclave. The old man is thus implicitly racialized yet remains racially ambiguous, allowing him to stand in for the racial and ethnic minorities of the city’s past and present while maintaining his connection to the white rural lifeways that form the unspoken basis of country music. By presenting this quasi-racialized old man as a source of climate wisdom, the song mirrors the insights of the environmental justice movement, which highlights how racialized and other marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by climate harms and should therefore be centered in climate mitigation and ecological reconstruction projects. Yet the song once again turns this insight against itself, for it is the old man—avatar of the city’s dispossessed communities—who rejects the need for mitigation efforts. We get Hurricane Katrina all over again, except this time the poor and dispossessed are the ones leaving poor Black and brown people to die.

“Hurricane” is a striking example of the future of climate denial. It absorbs the commonplaces of the environmental justice movement only to mobilize them in shoring up the status quo. It achieves this by weaponizing identity—local, regional, racial—toward the abandonment of the very communities it claims to represent. As climate collapse intensifies and the world continues to burn and flood, we might expect more of this particular brand of climate denialism. The resilience of marginalized communities will increasingly become evidence for why they don’t need help, while the representatives of those communities will be the ones delivering the news that no aid is coming.

In addition to providing a window into folk climate denial, “Hurricane” also tells us something about the role of rain in contemporary country music. If rain symbolizes predictable cycles and stable reproduction, it does so at the very moment that this can only be pure nostalgia, the moment when rain, like all weather, is a bad thing. This climate reality has serious implications for country as a genre. The agricultural employment that gave country music its material foundation is long gone, and now the stable weather patterns that represented that life in country’s symbolic imaginary have also disappeared. In the present, every prayer for rain is not a hope for the future but an invocation of the past. Country, of course, cannot admit this, as doing so would mean accepting its own irrelevance. Instead, it continues to recycle the same images, as if insistence alone could stave off the inevitable. In this context, the fact that “Hurricane” is a cover is almost too on-the-nose, for how better to insist that nothing has changed than to literally resurrect the past? The world now is not the world of 1981, and this song’s return to the radio exists purely to deny that truth.⁵

The old man promises that it “takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans,” a truism transformed from banal to horrifying by the knowledge that there is, in fact, a lot of water out there. Storm surges, torrential rain, flash floods—the water is rising all around us. If we are to survive the coming storm, we will have to do a lot more than pray.

June 2025

Jean Maro is a communist from Appalachia currently living on the west coast of North America.

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Footnotes

1. For one exploration of this argument, see Joshua Clover, “The High Rise and the Hollow,” Commune, April 24, 2019, https://communemag.com/the-high-rise-and-the-hollow/. Joshua introduced me to “Hurricane” shortly after it was released. I have never met anyone who loved country music like he did, and I owe my understanding of the genre to our many conversations over the years. ↩

2. We might hear an echo of Joe Diffie’s “John Deere Green” (1993), in which Billy Bob and Charlene “settle down on eighty acres, raisin’ sweet corn, kids, and tomatoes.” ↩

3. The Climate Reality Project, “Frontline and Fenceline Communities,” https://www.climaterealityproject.org/frontline-fenceline-communities. For other examples of how climate justice frameworks understand the role of local communities and marginalized people in climate activism, see AU Center for Climate Preparedness and Community Resilience, Centering Equity in Climate Resilience Planning and Action, https://www.climateresiliencefund.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Centering-Equity-in-Climate-Resilience-Planning-and-Action-2022.pdf and International Climate Justice Network, “Bali Principles of Climate Justice,” https://www.corpwatch.org/article/bali-principles-climate-justice. ↩

4. I like to imagine that the engineer does not return to Chicago, where he had been living a rather dissolute life, but instead stays in the South and eventually becomes the love interest of Morgan Wade’s “Wilder Days.” ↩

5. That denial may be incomplete, however. While the original song is in a joyous, almost playful major key, the cover transforms it into a darker minor mode that sounds at once more defiant and less hopeful. One has to wonder if this change represents an unconscious recognition that things have gotten worse, even if that reality remains unsayable. ↩