Five years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster fouled the Gulf of Mexico with oil, a haunting instrumental written by a Mobile musician in the days after the spill still resonates with the people who heard it — and it carries a second, unexpected layer of meaning today.
David Hughes grew up spending summers at his grandfather’s cottage near Weeks Bay in Baldwin County, fishing, swimming and water-skiing with his older brother, John. When tar balls began washing ashore in 2010, Hughes — then a percussionist with the Mobile-based Celtic group Mithril — found himself gripped by a specific fear: that his own children might never get to experience the bays and coastline the way he and his brother had.
The idea for a song came from his mother, Stephanie Hughes, who suggested during a phone call that Mithril dedicate a piece of music to the families and wildlife affected by the spill. After hanging up, Hughes picked up a melodica and worked out a simple, flowing melody, then found the chords on an old guitar. Within an hour he brought it to band rehearsal, where the rest of Mithril built it out with violin, guitar and penny whistle.
The instrumental became a fixture of the band’s live sets that year, including an opening slot for guitarist Billy McLaughlin at Mobile’s Saenger Theatre. Audience members repeatedly told Hughes the piece moved them to tears, stirring memories of growing up on the water. A family friend later described the performance as laying out “the brightest orange ocean-level boom — a life raft for our spirits,” a phrase that stuck with the band.
After recording the track in Hughes’ home studio and posting it to his blog, it was downloaded 1,500 times within days. The title — “Cross Your Heart, Pray for Hope” — came from two suggestions offered by his daughter and a bandmate’s son, which Hughes combined. He has described the song as an attempt to process the spill through the eyes of a child confused about why he could no longer play in the water.
Not long after that period, Hughes left Mithril after roughly a decade with the group and stepped away from music entirely following the birth of his third child, who has significant health needs. He went on to work as a webmaster at a Mobile school.
Recently, while sorting through old papers, Hughes came across lyrics he had written for the melody years earlier and had since forgotten entirely. Reading them again brought him to tears: the words told the story of two brothers who grew up playing by the bay, one of whom eventually dies, leaving the younger brother to carry forward a promise of loyalty and hope.
The lyrics took on new weight after Hughes’ own brother, John, died unexpectedly at age 42 just over a year ago. Finding words that seemed to foreshadow his family’s loss left Hughes shaken, but he said the song — originally written to offer hope to Gulf Coast residents grieving the spill’s damage — has since become a source of comfort for him personally.
Hughes now says he is preparing to return to music, picking the acoustic guitar back up and planning a handful of local performances around Mobile in the coming months, five years after the spill first inspired the tune.