Here's the full text of a recent online article (link is way too long) -

POST TIME: 1928 storm spawned song whose writer remains unknown
By Eliot Kleinberg - Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Posted: 12:00 a.m. Thursday, September 12, 2013

Readers: This week marks the 85th anniversary of arguably the most profound single event in the history of Palm Beach County: the great Okeechobee hurricane of Sept. 16, 1928.

The Post is noting the storm, and its legacy, in several current stories. For our purposes, we turn to one of the great mysteries to emerge from the event: the source of the tune, "Somebody Got Drowned." Here's more from a 2007 column:

No author has ever been found and, while lyrics first appeared in the press weeks after the storm, the first time this reporter heard the tune was in 2003. It was from a 1974 documentary, "From These Roots," by filmmaker William B. Greaves.

Some new information about the song has come from, of all places, Italian music scholar Luigi Monge, who published an 2007 article in Cambridge University's publication, Popular Music. His research at the U.S. Library of Congress found no fewer than four different field recordings of the song, with different titles.

"God Rode on a Mighty Storm" was sung in 1935 by singer Lily Mae Atkinson at St. Simon's Island, Ga., and recorded by a team that included Zora Neale Hurston.

Two recordings of "In That Storm" were made in 1936 by folklorist John A. Lomax in Gainesville. They're credited to "George Washington and Group of Negro Convicts."

The fourth, made in 1937, is titled "West Palm Beach Storm" and performed by Viola Jenkins, who said she learned it from oral tradition.

"Oral tradition" probably is as close as we'll ever get to the source of a tune that grew from a catastrophe and emerged from a downtrodden part of society.



Note: Same newspaper as 1928. Includes a reprint of the full lyrics (see OP).