Every island in the Caribbean has one, if not many: Popular songs inspired by the awful storms that have always been at once facts of life and shapers of history. In this region, from whose indigenous people we got our word — “huracan” — for the fierce tempests that swirl off the Atlantic in late summer and early fall, hurricanes have long been key to culture.

And hurricane songs — mournful, brave, witty or sad — are everywhere. Even before 1953, when the United States National Hurricane Center’s move to give storms human names provided clever lyricists with new ways to decry those storms’ capriciousness, iconic songs and singers in the Caribbean were hymning the power of hurricanes — to make or break leaders, to wreck industries, to force the vulnerable or devastated, at a weekend’s notice, to flee their homes and hunt new ones.

When Hurricane Dorian brought this fate to the poor people of the Bahamas, many across that sandy archipelago were no doubt reminded of a famous Bahamian folk song, “Run, Come See Jerusalem,” that a Bahamian calypso singer known as Blind Blake Higgs wrote to recall a harsh storm there in 1929.

In the ’50s, the Weavers and other American folkies covered Blake Higgs’s tune. But here on the mainland, hurricanes haven’t historically featured as strongly in our cultural memory. Yes, they’ve marked our past and our cities. But in the American songbook, even our best-known songs about climactic disasters — from Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads to the blues songs about rivers rising and levees breaking — have tended to be less about storms, per se, than about water.