SAMPLE
Baby please don’t go down to New Orleans. Down to New Orleans (x2)
Baby please don’t go down to New Orleans, you know I love you so baby please don’t go.

VERSE 1
…the words I heard my mother utter from her lips as I muttered “I got to.”
Flooding, diseases, crooked cops, yeah ma I got you.
I understand it’s dangerous, I’m not tryint to shock you.
But there’s no way I can sit in my dry dorm room and watch news
stories of families in tragedy, huddled under canopies
sayin how can this be? And how can I talk candidly
of saving the world/and treating others as family
if when it unfurls, I don’t go? That ain’t a man to me.
‘Cause for a few months everyone will give their money
then forget about it as fast as we did the Tusnami.
And add it to their “Why I hate Bush” list.
but hardly make the push to the problem that exists
and this “What difference can I make anyway?”
has taken a toll on may (me). So I’m leavin today.
Trading in my Spring Break
‘Cuz if actions speak louder than words, I can hear the President say…

CHORUS
(sample) …Baby Please don’t go down to New Orleans…
(the bridge from “Won’t You Stay” Talib Kweli)
(Me) I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta- (Female) baby don’t go
(Me) I gotta go, I gotta go, I gottta, (Female) baby don’t go
(Me) I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta- (Female) baby don’t go
(Me) I gotta go, I gotta go, I gottta, (Female) baby don’t go

VERSE 2
My heart is saying go, but my brain is telling me
That I gotta catch up in school, that I gotta go to work
That I gotta visit family, and besides, my pockets hurt.
So how can I raise the money for tickets,
when I can barely spare the money to pay my mom a visit
and is it/ feasible for me to go a thousand miles away?
Using my own excuses as reasons for me to stay.
Just like the thousands of others, who said that they cared.
But how will words help you ain’t there?
Half a million kids went to Cabo and Cancun.
Some went home, and others stayed in their room.
But if half of us would have mad the trip, believe me.
Drying out the big easy would have been….easy
See we don’t care unless it’s our emergency
I can’t believe I listened to the voices that were telling me…

VERSE 3
When the crews came back, they were like dag mac
You should’ve been there the whole place looked like Bagdhad!
It was mad bad, nah, worse than TV
A situation they definitely don’t want you to see.
How the Levees blew, ‘cause so many had so few
Leaving the poor vulnerable, and all the time they knew.
FEMA and the money raised by the Red Cross got lost
in government b.s. that restricted the force.
And when you know that tax dollars could have prevented it all
How do you console someone for their loss?
Gone is their house their car and their home.
“I guess they’re better off livin in the astrodome.”
Cause the media, and TV politics is blatant,
so why’d Kanye retract his own statement
‘Cause it’s not okay, its not all good
Fifteen hundred people ain’t have to die in that flood
Like the people who fled to higher ground and got shot down
and the inmates left locked in prison to drown
and you and see their faces, or know how it felt
To give a few forgotten people our help.
And I don’t know how it felt, and I don’t want to wonder
So I’m packing up my bags, and going this summer.