FOR A THIRD YEAR IN A ROW, THROUGH the TREES performed at the ‘Green Jam’ fundraiser for the West Virginia Environmental Council, held November 25, 2025, at the Empty Glass in the Mountain State’s capital city of Charleston. One of the tunes the group performed was ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,’ (SEE VIDEO ABOVE), a powerful song from slave days in America of longing, loss, and separation. The Trees’ lead singer and guitarist Douglas John Imbrogno has added several contemporary lyrics to the song (SEE BELOW). These include several lines in Spanish that speak to the aggressive and cruel detention and deportation of immigrants and people with brown skin in America, under Donald Trump’s first and second administrations.
As the Wikipedia page for ‘Motherless Child’ notes:
The song is an expression of pain and despair as the singer compares their hopelessness to that of a child who has been torn from its parents. Under one interpretation, the repetition of the word “sometimes” offers a measure of hope, as it suggests that at least “sometimes” the singer does not feel like a motherless child.
“I first wrote and added my contemporary lyrics to ‘Motherless Child’ in the first Trump administration, angered and moved by images of young people in detention centers, ripped and separated from their parents,” notes Imbrogno. “Of course, everything has gotten far worse in 2025 with the wannabe-autocracy of Trump 2.0. He has super-sized the repression with the injection of more than a billion dollars for his personal junta security force, via the many violent, roving bands of free-range ICE bullies, overseen by Donald’s ready-for-her-closeup factotum Kristi Noem.”
As the singer and writer’s recent ‘Transcontinental Impressions’ essay in his web journal WestVirginiaVille notes: ‘Here’s a not-so-fun fact: ICE’s billion-dollar budget is now so large it is ‘bigger than most of the world’s militaries.’
“You do what you can in resisting such awfulness,” he continues. “Protest songs of objection, solidarity, and raising awareness have always been a small, yet significant part of any movement of resistance.”
NOTES: (1) The live version of the song in the Empty Glass video above differs slightly in some of the singer’s phrasings from the May 24, 2025-dated song-sheet below. (2) Any native and/or superior speakers of Spanish are welcome to suggest a more colloquial take of Doug’s translation into Spanish of the refrain seen below. (3) Finally, THROUGH the TREES sends a thousand thanks to Jozlend Tucker for filming this performance and sharing the footage, which now includes added cuts and transitions. We’d thought our performance lost in the tides of time!
_/\_
P.S. | Hear the Trees ‘Branch Out’ on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026
Hear THROUGH the TREES perform ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Mother Child’ live, along with many other tunes, as the electric, eclectic folk-chamber ensemble hosts the evening concert ‘BRANCHING OUT,’ from 7 to 9 p.m., SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2026, in the UNITY of KANAWHA VALLEY upstairs sanctuary, 804 Myrtle Road, Charleston, W.Va., 25314. The concert features ensemble founding members Ray Garnett, Jim Probst, and Douglas John Imbrogno, plus special guest appearances by Ron Sowell, Robin Kessinger, Kyle Vass, and Jeff Haught.
ADMISSION IS BY DONATIONS AT THE DOOR. Support live performance and local musicians! HEAR MORE MUSIC AT: throughthetreesgroup.com
