WEST BLOCTON, Ala.—“The lilies have bloomed this season if you know where to go.”

It’s a line in Birmingham band I Declare’s newly released song “Cahaba,” and it’s the truth.

At the recent Cahaba Lily festival, you could hear the sacred Southern knowledge passing from one person to another.

“Where do you go? Have you been yet? Is the water low enough to see them?”

The lilies, a species endemic to the southeastern U.S., are named after Alabama’s longest free-flowing river, the Cahaba. They bloom boldly atop the jagged shoals that line the river’s bottom each year between Mother’s Day in May and Father’s Day in June.

This year, as is growing more often the case, an unusually rainy May has led to a less than ideal viewing season. But still, like clockwork, Alabamians have flocked to the

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