There are many lovely versions of the great old song, “Drifting Too Far from the Shore,” written by one Charles E. Moody. There’s Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, and Emmylou Harris, for starters. In the documentary “No Direction Home,” Bob Dylan credits his first hearing of this song, as a child, with igniting a kind of mystical experience for him. When he heard it (it was a record left sitting on a record player in the house his family had moved into) he says he felt like he “was somebody else.” (You might even say he was kind of transfigured.)
Anyhow, the version embedded below via YouTube is by Jerry Garcia, David Grisman and Tony Rice. And it too is lovely. (From an album titled The Pizza Tapes
)
Today, the tempest rose high,
and clouds overshadow the sky.
Sure death is hovering nigh,
You’re drifting too far from the shore
The songwriter seems preoccupied with mortality, doesn’t he? He must have been really old.