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Listen: Sad Songs Say So Much: A Look at Songs about Disasters

The rapper Chuck D once said that Rap music is “the CNN of the ghetto.”  By that, he meant that poor people do not have the means to tell the stories of their tragedies on TV, so they had to do it through songs.  It turns out that’s a pretty old idea and that tradition did not start with rap.  It has been a long time that poor people have turned to music to talk about disasters that happened to and near them with songs like Ohio Prison Fire from 1930 that talks of “Frantic convicts” who “begged for air.  Many were cremated there.”  Or  Burning of the Cleveland School from 1923 that included the lyrics:

You could hear the children screaming

As the flames were rolling high.

"Daddy come and get you baby,"

Would you stand and see him die?

Steven Mooney teaches English and Appalachian Studies at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia.  He says that songs like these talk about, “things that tore holes the very souls of people.  Human beings,” he says, “have to try to find ways to be able to make sense of soul killing things.”  One channel of communication that, he points out was available to less-fortunate people was music.

Today of course, if you want to talk about a national tragedy or a family tragedy, there are plenty of ways to do it.  You can post your thoughts on Facebook.  You can shoot a video of yourself talking about it and put it on YouTube.  Or you can sit and watch TV as the news talks on and on about it.  It was not that long ago, however, that you could not do that.  In the days before the internet and before television and radio, one way people would pass along news was through songs.  Jason Schaeffer, an English professor at the US Naval Academy, who wrote a book about how ideas traveled around in the early days of America, says that songs were spreading the news even in the days before there were a lot of printing presses in America.  “The way that it often spreads,” back then, Schaeffer says, “is the sort of social networking were kind of viral marketing almost.”  People would send each other songs by mail.  They would write the lyrics in a letter and say “Hey, we all sang this song last night at the tavern.  Pass it along.”  Schaeffer compares it to “an e-mail forward, almost, or it’s very much the same way that you might post something that you want your friends to read on your Facebook page.  It’s a very sort of early form of social networking.”

In the earliest days, they’d write songs about the British.  Or songs about liberty and revolution.  Then, once America had gained its independence, the tradition kept up.  And instead of singing about revolution, they turned to songs about everyday life.  Especially songs about disaster.  It is an odd thing, though that while people like to write songs about disasters, they write most only about certain kinds of disasters.  There’s actually a book called Country Music Sources, where you can look up all the American folk songs about disasters.  When you go there, you find out for instance that there are only two song about plane crashes, and songs about only two civilian ship wrecks – the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald.

There are only four songs about tornadoes, one of which is called The Cyclone Of Rye Cove, that goes,

When the cyclone appeared it darkened the air

Yet the lightning flashed over the sky

And the children all cried “Don't take us away

And spare us to go back home.”

Plus, there is only one song about a flu epidemic, and only one about kids drowning.  Oddly though, what you will find if you look for disaster songs is that for two kinds of disasters that have a bunch of songs.  Those are train wrecks and mining disasters.  Why?  Well it turns out it’s a little about geography and a little bit about human nature.  First, about geography, according to Katie Letcher-Lyle, author of the book Scalded to Death by the Steam: Authentic Stories of Railroad Disasters, “It was an Appalachian tradition to write about events that occurred.  In Appalachia,” she says, “there is a tradition of singing about whatever happens.”

According to Virginia Tech professor Steven Mooney, for people in this part of the country, writing and singing songs was just what you did.  “When the men got home from their shifts,” he says, “they went out on their porches” where someone would start singing and families would gather from all around.  They would sing about work, or they would sing hymns from church or songs they had written themselves about God, and share these songs with the people around them.

Sometimes, Mooney says people would write these songs without knowing or caring whether anyone would even hear them.  “A song was written for no one but the person who produced it,” he says.  As it happens, Appalachia’s where the coal mines are, so it makes sense that this would be the place where you would find a song written like West Virginia Mine Disaster which begins:

It was just about noon, I was feeding the children

Ben Moseley come running for to give us the news

Number eight is all flooded, many men are in danger

And we don't know their number, but we fear they're all doomed.

Mining is a particularly difficult and dangerous kind of work.  You are down underground in the dark, breathing in dust all day.  There are fumes and poisonous gas and you and your family know that at any time, the walls could collapse and you’ll be trapped or crushed.  As Steven Mooney says, “To be a mother or a wife and to know that there has been an explosion underground and to go to the workplace and to have to stand outside in the rain and in the cold to wait days and days and days to just -- to try to find out any sense of whether your loved one is alive or dead; and the fear and stark terror – there’s almost no room within the context of a mining song for it to be anything but a kind of articulation of terror and fear and worry.  The West Virginia Mine Disaster song reflects that fear.

And it's what will I tell to my three little children?

And what will I tell his dear mother at home?

And it's what will I tell to my poor heart that's dying?

My heart that's surely dying since my darling is gone.

There is another reason why there are so many mining disaster songs, Steven Mooney says, and that reason is power – what he calls the “omnipotent level of power on the part of the mining industry.”  The companies controlled everything – what you could buy, what you could eat – but they also controlled the newspapers and what was taught in the schools.  While the miners themselves were mostly people who couldn’t read or write.  So it was the companies that were writing the history books and the articles that explained life in that region.  For the miners, Mooney says, “One channel of communication was songs and the writing of songs.”

So mining disaster songs were heartfelt, personal expressions of the hardship and suffering of people who lived in great danger which, for the most part they were not written for money.  Train wreck songs on the other hand were something else entirely.  According to Katie Letcher-Lyle, “After a train wreck, a guy would just come running in there and within 24 hours he would have broadsides selling for a penny each on the street about this train wreck that had occurred.  They were poorly written.  Sometimes the rhymes were just dreadful or didn't even -- they didn't even rhyme at all.”

Railroad trains were the most exotic technology of their time.  They were huge and powerful, could take over mountains and across rivers in no time at all.  The machine was a beautiful, shining, charging beast, and up in front driving were the heroes -- the young, handsome engineers.  According to Letcher-Lyle, train engineers “were raised up the way movie stars are now or sports figures.”  A lot of them, she says, “actually had a fan club that would stand at stations when their trains were due in and wave to them and throw them kisses and bring them homemade goodies and stuff.”

When she was writing her book, Letcher-Lyle went in and read all the government reports about the wrecks that these songs were about.  She learned something important about what caused these crashes.  It turns out, the blame lay mostly with those hero engineers.  “They just rode their engines too fast,” she said, though of course you never heard about that in the songs.  “The foolhardiness of the engineer is never a part of the song,” she says,  “He always dies for the engine he loves and he is noble and he says to ‘Please remember’ and things like that.  No, he's very noble to the end.  Never mind that he might have been drunk in reality, or that he was definitely driving his train too fast.”

As far as their style, these railroad disaster songs always followed a pattern.  You could line them up side by side and they’d all be pretty much the same.  At the start you’d hear about the weather.  As Lecher-Lyle says, they would always say things like, “’T’was a cold and dark, cloudy evening.  Just before the close of the day.’ Or ‘It was in the midst of May and the green leaves were just coming out on the trees,’ so that the listener could get a kind of pictorial idea of what was going on.”  Then the story would begin, and pretty soon you'd have the engineer and his fireman having their final conversation, and Letcher-Lyle says, there is “always a kind of hint like, ‘Little did they know this was to be their final ride.’”  Sometimes, she says, “a doctor would interact with them before they died.  The doctor said, ‘Oh Georgie, your life can not be saved.  Murdered upon the railroad and laid in a lonesome grave.’”  Finally, almost, there would be a moral.  Though it was never anything about being more careful driving the train.  It was usually something about “Make sure you pray every morning because you never know when you’ll die.”

We really don’t have these disaster songs anymore.  Steven Mooney says that’s mostly because we don’t have those kinds of communities anymore.  For generations, people in that part of America have been telling their children, “You're not going to go down in those mines.”  At the same time more educational opportunities opened up in these communities, and machines came in to replace a lot of the physical labor that used to be done by men.  But while all that was certainly healthier for the people who lived in Appalachia, Steven Mooney says that you can’t help but say that losing all that meant losing something important too.  “These things are gone,” he says, “and they can't be brought back.”  Going along with them is a style of music – the song of disaster that we may never see again.