Monday, July 12, 2010. At a town hall open mic hosted by the Presidential Oil Spill Commission, Drew Landry, an unemployed Cajun crawfisherman, whipped out his guitar and sang to the omnipotent administrators. They shifted uneasily in their seats, knowing they're supposed to appear receptive and appreciative. They are placed in the unlikely situation of having to listen to an extended bit of straight-from-the-heart eloquence, of plainspoken home truths, rather than hogging the limelight with their usual protocols and platitudes.

Landry sings about living close to the land and water, a simple, hardscrabble existence that was already in jeopardy, even before Hurricane Katrina, but has seemingly been administered a death blow by the current spill. He and his neighbors in southwest Louisiana work the crawfish holes or the oil fields, pick floating cypress logs out of the bayou, do the odd construction job, hunt and trap. The recent calamity, coming after years of wetlands deforestation, has been devastating to their way of life. He expresses their hardship in this song.

The lyrics:

Grew up on the southern shore
Louisiana now there ain't no more
Kicking mud off up a crawfish hole
Barefooted with a fishing pole

Kicking mud up off a crawfish hole
Barefooted with a fishing pole
Going back into the oil fields
That's the only way to pay our bills.

The song is well worth a listen. But Landry's keen spoken observations - on how the spill has impacted on the "little people" (as per BP), how resources are being squandered on an army of outside contractors, how there is no protection from the upcoming hurricane season with all the oil and chemicals floating offshore - are just about essential.

"I still don't have a job. I just wanted to clean up the spill. And there's millions of volunteers that want to do something, that are willing to work for almost nothing. Instead we're hiring all these contractors and wasting our $20 billion.

"We definitely need other solutions. Going green, whatever it takes. All of our people are out of work right now, and we don't have any fisheries. We got nothin'. We don't want to be a welfare state. There's no point in that. There are hard working people.

"We're not ready for hurricane season. There's a Gulf full of oil. And we're sitting here worrying about this right now when we need to be giving people Hazmat training so they can defend their homeland, so they're not going to be kicked out forever. This could be the next expulsion of the Cajun people, people who love this place.

"It feels that BP is in control of this deal and the Coast Guard does what they want. The press can't be around. But more importantly, the people don't have a voice. They're upset.

"It just sucks. Let's just do the right damn thing. It shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't take a committee to listen to people."

Several times he interjects, "I know y'all all care. You wouldn't be here if you didn't care." But looking at the practiced poker faces of these career plutocrats, the institutional and class connections between BP and DC seem all too cozy.

Landry is the subject of a documentary film, Last Man Standing: The Drew Landry Story. This synopsis is taken from the film's website:

Eight years ago, Drew Landry had scarcely picked up a guitar, but the truth and authenticity of his songs are generations old. Born into the heart of Southwest Louisiana’s Cajun Country, Landry was raised amid the pressures of poverty, divorce, child abuse, illness, and a culture vanishing before his eyes. Through it all he has stubbornly persisted, using his hard-hitting past and deep-rooted culture as fuel for his poignant lyricism.

Through an intimate, cinema verite style, Last Man Standing chronicles three years of Landry’s life as he struggles to follow his “calling” in the wake of family pressures, failed business ventures and the unexpected tragedy of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Though he claims “he’s just telling his stories,” it’s clear that his songs offer a therapeutic voice to one of the most historically disenfranchised parts of the American landscape.

The entire film can be viewed, in ten parts, on the site. Here's Part I: