Ever wonder what it would be like to be a mail-order bride? This lyric is based on an actual historical importing of twenty-three French women to Biloxi, Mississippi to prevent the French men from fraternizing with the local Indian women when France sought to establish a colony in the New World.
They said I’d wed a rich man
In this God-forsaken land.
He’d have won his fortune
And be waiting for my hand.
But it was not for New World’s gold
I left my home in France
To cross the broad Atlantic
And dance the Pelicans Dance.
Great birds, graceful in their flight,
Who lurch upon the land.
They hobble drunkenly about,
And scarcely seem to stand.
Their step is solemn and so odd–
They know no waltz or prance.
No gay Parie awaited me
There at the Pelicans Dance.
Endless fever bayous
Where strange moss hangs from the trees.
Lurking alligators
Among the cypress knees.
Two hundred men on Biloxi’s shore,
And we were twenty-three–
A prize among dark Indian girls,
In Pelican Country.
Great birds, graceful in their flight,
Who lurch upon the land.
They hobble drunkenly about,
And scarcely seem to stand.
Their step is solemn and so odd–
They know no waltz or prance.
No gay Parie awaited me
There at the Pelican’s Dance.
By week’s end I had met and wed
Pierre, the Captain’s son.
He took me to his pallet,
And so the deed was done.
But he loved rum and black-eyed girls
With skin a darker hue.
When his swamp boat went missing,
Then I wed number two.
Great birds, graceful in their flight,
Who lurch upon the land.
They hobble drunkenly about,
And scarcely seem to stand.
Their step is solemn and so odd–
They know no waltz or prance.
No gay Parie awaited me
There at the Pelicans Dance.
Four husbands I have lost now
As I board this ship to sail.
Their wealth in gold lies in the hold,
As I lean on the rail.
I’ve been paid in pain and years,
I bet all on one chance.
The dice is tossed. What have I lost
To dance the Pelicans Dance?
Great birds, graceful in their flight,
Who lurch upon the land.
They hobble drunkenly about,
And scarcely seem to stand.
Their step is solemn and so odd–
They know no waltz or prance.
No gay Parie awaited me
There at the Pelicans Dance.
c2001 Skip Johnson
All rights reserved
This song lyric is based on a fragmentary historical account concerning twenty-three “Pelican Girls”, who were carefully selected in France as wives for settlers when that country sought to establish a colony near Biloxi, Mississippi. The strangeness of these arranged marriages and the oddness of the pelican’s waddle on land compared with its gliding grace in the air is the point of the piece. I wrote the lyric where it all happened during a weekend just across from Biloxi’s beach. The French imported women from France to cut down on the fraternizing with the Indian women. The hotel where we were staying was later demolished, along with the many casinos, by the hurricane Katrina.
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