The seventh song from Tori Amos's album Scarlet's Walk, following Crazy, preluding Don't Make Me Come To Vegas.
With her low-key, heart-stirring a cappella song Me and a Gun, Tori Amos discovered the power of the voice alone when it comes to reveal a message. In Wampum Prayer, she brings out that power to talk about another crime, not the rape of a woman this time, but that of a people and their land.
Scarlet's journey for this song starts in Tucson, Arizona and crosses the Great Plains through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and western Missouri. Visiting the site of a massacre of the Apache people, Scarlet is deeply disturbed and finds herself dreaming about those who were killed. She receives a nightly visitor - an old woman who survived, a link between her and the aboriginal people in the land. The full connection is made as she enters the lands of the Cherokee, the ancestors of Scarlet - and those of Tori.
The song is very short, and is almost over before you hear it if you don't pay attention. It could be a prelude to Don't make me come to Vegas, which follows it on the cd, but it is also a thread with a color of its own. Interestingly, the ending lines have exactly the same melody as a phrase in A Sorta Fairytale: "We're just impostors in this country."
In our hand
an old old
old thread
Trail of Blood
and Amens
Greed is the
gift for the
sons of the
sons
Hear this prayer
of the
wampum
This is the tie
that will
bind us
CST Approved