Last night, the New Edinburgh Folk Club (aka the Dunedin Folk Club) hosted the great Jez Lowe for what was an absolutely fantastic gig. (Next week, we’ll host Andy Irvine.) Among the many wonderful songs performed was one that Jez penned in 2009 for the Darwin Song Project called ‘We’ll Hunt Him Down’, a song which imagines a band of conservative American preachers marching (or riding) across the US in a holy mission to rid the land of the Darwin scourge. Jez told of how he recently played the song in a US church, to a mixed response. I thought the song was very witty, and damn good fun, and so I wanted to share it here. So here’s a clip of the song’s first public performance at the 2009 Shrewsbury Folk Festival, performed by Jez Lowe, Chris Wood and Mark Erelli:

Across this noble country, this fair land of the free,
I’m searching for the man who stole my Lord away from me,
And God is riding with me, and half the town is too,
His name is Charlie Darwin and he must not talk to you.

We’ll hunt him down, we’ll hunt him down,
And every word he ever said we’ll grind into the ground,
We’ll hunt him down, we’ll hunt him down,
Charles Robert Darwin, you’re not welcome in this town.

At first we thought him crazy, so we just let him be,
Playing with worms and flies and little critters from the sea,
Then he started spreading rumours that you scarcely would believe,
That my ancestors were chimpanzees, not Adam and Eve.

We’ll hunt him down …

It’s hard to think about him without sinking to abuse,
They say that he’s an Englishman, but that’s still no excuse,
He’s robbed our schools and churches of the truth the bible tells,
So we’re out to stop his Godless ways and damn his words to hell.

We’ll hunt him down …

We’re holy and we’re righteous, and we know it to be true,
That it was on a Saturday morning that God made me and you,
He made us smart and clever, he even gave us tools,
Like guns and bombs and rifles, that shows you God’s no fool.

We’ll hunt him down …