These are the words to "Cherokee Queen" ( by Carl Oglesby) that Lawrence Hammond sang on Mad River's "Paradise Bar and Grill:"

Said the Cherokee Queen
Are you goin' my way?
Is that a road map I see
Clutched in your tremblin' hand?
My warrior so brave laid his ambush
in a place where the moon made him blind.
And we couldn't get word down the river in time.
And all we could hear in the night
was the sound of him dyin."

My tall bronze man
with the cloud-colored eyes..
There was a ruby in the forehead of my love.
But the circle-of-silence was broken,
and no one could remember the plan.
And the wise-men just cringed in the temple all night
waiting for word or the newcomers' final demands.

Now the ceiling fan
turns slowly in the night,
and the winner deals me another hand of lies.
Oh yeah..playin' again with the master
I draw two, the old pair of freaks.
And prayin' again for disaster to come
bleeding with whiskey I dream of my old Cherokee.
Bleeding with whiskey
I dream of my old cherokee..

Lawrence Hammond had a pretty good sense for a good song. I have often puzzled over the words to this one. It seems to me to be sort of hallucinatory portrayal of the devastation and demoralization of native peoples ground under by the encroachment of Europeans, but it does not seem to be just a specific picture of the oppression of the Cherokee, the Trail of Tears etc.

The production on this track is so much like what Hammond ended up sounding like (think "Coyote's Dream") , simple and haunting. I heard him play when I was a student at UC Berkeley.We love him here in Germany!