“Lord We Get High” by The Fox Hunt 

Fiddles soar over a slow marching guitar strummed in time with a deep, pulsating upright bass. The sweet, sorrowful melody feels innately funerary. With a rhythm like footsteps approaching a gravesite, equal parts trepidation and determination, the beauty in the tune is that of sunshine pouring over a headstone on a perfect spring morning, or bar lights mixing with whiskey. But this is the music of rising things, of people standing to honor the dead, invisible spirits lifting into an unfathomably blue sky, glasses held high overhead. 

This is “Lord We Get High” by The Fox Hunt, a now-defunct Appalachian Americana group from Martinsburg, West Virginia.  Appearing on their inexcusably underrecognized 2007 debut, Nowhere Bound, “Lord We Get High” is a standout track among an impeccable collection of songs that should have cemented their place in the canon of American music.  

“I finish my set, pack up my guitar 

Reclaim my place at the end of the bar.” 

The Fox Hunt plays a porch in Virginia.
Image courtesy of Ian M. Graham at RVA Magazine

On its surface, this is not a song about death. But it does seem to be about endings, and finding some semblance of spiritual fullness amid the transience of life. An old-time string band version of a toast, it presents itself openly for what it is within the church-house harmonies of its chorus:

“It’s just an old drinking song, 

Everybody knows the words, sings along, 

Now none of us are religious men 

But if you heard us sing, you’d think we were singing a hymn.” 

“Lord We Get High” is a song that evokes images of friends locked arm in arm, swaying side to side, smiling, crying, a desperately alive community of grieving. Softly celebratory and elegantly mournful, it speaks to the comforts of camaraderie amid the terrible and fleeting beauty of this world, culminating in a near-choral refrain of booze-drenched catharsis: 

“Lord we get high, Lord we get low,

Where we’ll end up, Lord only knows.”  

This is a song for pastoral burial grounds and backroad dive bars, for good friends and close families missing a member from their gathering, a hymn for the nonreligious and devout alike. But it’s also a song for everyone who is going, at some point, to die. Start listening now. It may well find its way into your advanced directive.