Thursday Inspiration #229 Powderfinger

Respond to this challenge, by either using the prompt word river, or going with the above picture, or by means of the song ‘Powderfinger’, or by going with another song by Neil Young, or any other song from 1979, or you can go with anything else that you think fits.  ‘Powderfinger’ was written by Neil Young and recorded on his 1979 tenth album Rust Never Sleeps, which was his third album with Crazy Horse.  The lyrics of this epic Southern or Western story are the posthumous narration of a lone 22-year-old that spots an approaching gunboat (a naval watercraft designed for the express purpose of carrying one or more guns to bombard coastal targets).  The ill prepared and confused youth realizes that it is his duty to protect his family since all of the older men are unavailable, leaving him as the only man left to defend his outlaw kin against government soldiers now that his daddy’s dead and his brother John is out hunting.  His older brother John has been doing a lot of drinking lately since his wife Annie-Lou drowned in the river, leaving him to do the thinking.  He grabs his daddy’s rifle as the gunboat gets closer, which I imagine to be a black powder flintlock musket, because that seems to fit in with the chronological era of this song and it also applies to the title of this song where you would have to pour black powder down the barrel that would get on your fingers.  As he prepares to shoot the firearm, a round from the gunboat blasts him, and he is ultimately killed.  Neil doesn’t make anything that clear in this song, and I guess he wants to keep his fans guessing, but I did read that this song is also a mystery to him.

Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro said this song came to Young in a seizure dream.  A 2014 Rolling Stone special issue on Young ranked it as Young’s best song ever.  Young allegedly offered the track to Southern rock heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd, but they never managed to record it before the tragic plane crash that killed members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines in 1977.  It is thought that someone from Lynyrd Skynyrd told Neil a story about some event in the South, and Neil transposed that story of a Confederate soldier into this song.  Some people feel that the “white boat” mentioned in this song is actually a Coast Guard Cutter, and the family being attacked are involved in drug running or operating an illegal distillation business.  Something else that I read may explain this song and that relates to residents who lived in the Tennessee Valley initially refusing to sell their land and they were often forced to do so via court orders and lawsuits.

Look out mama, there’s a white boat comin’ up the river
With a big red beacon and a flag and a man on the rail
I think you better call John
‘Cause it don’t look like they’re here to deliver the mail