Rick Bowers of Silver Spring says the idea to write a song about fish originally came to him when he was out with friends fishing off a bridge at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester, Maryland.
“It just started going through my brain: ‘Chesapeake Channa, Chesapeake Channa, Chesapeake Channa.’ So when I got home, I wrote a whole song about it and then produced the song. And hey, the rest is history,” Bowers said.
Both of Bowers’ songs “Chesapeake Channa” and “Blue Cat Blues,” which can be found on Spotify, are about two of the Chesapeake Bay’s invasive fish species, the blue catfish and the Chesapeake Channa, formerly known as “snakehead fish.”
Bowers, 72, said he wrote the tunes for the same reason Maryland lawmakers changed the fish’s name earlier this year — so they’d get eaten.
“It frustrates me that, here we have an estimated 100 million blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and we have people who need food. I mean, it’s not hard to connect those two dots,” Bowers said.
He said among the 100 million population, those catfish can get anywhere from 40 to 100 pounds. They eat crabs, rockfish, clams and more. But the only thing that eats them, Bowers said, is humans.
“As the song says, they’re sucking up the bay like a vacuum cleaner. I think that it is such a crisis that we need to bring attention to, and we need to bring attention to the obvious solution, which are these are great tasting fish,” Bowers said.
He said he knows of one processor who’s exporting thousands of pounds of blue catfish from the bay to an outlet in San Francisco.
“These catfish grow up in this brackish water that’s salty, so they’re literally brining their entire lives, and their diet is crab and rockfish eggs and perch,” Bowers said. “They’re whiter, they’re meatier and cleaner tasting. So they’re now becoming a delicacy not only here, but out on the West Coast.”
But Bowers, who said he’s had six of his songs featured in NBC’s “Friday Night Lights,” only writes music on the side.
As a clean water captain with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and a member of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources’ Blue Catfish Advisory Committee, Bowers spends much of his time proposing solutions to the destructive invasion of these fish in the bay.
He said he uses opportunities such as writing songs about invasive fish species to bring awareness to what he calls a “fixable problem.”
“If I’m giving a lecture on this, people kind of tune out,” Bowers said. “But music just gets through all their defenses, so they embrace it in a different way. It becomes an emotional connection.”
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