Music Review: Various Artists, People Take Warning!: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938

From the wreck of the Titanic through the Great Depression, American folk musicians regularly communicated stories of disasters and murders through song, often adding religious morals. New technologies, especially in transportation, had created a whole new category of disasters that singers and pickers could recount. They still retold the old stories, but they also wrote new, topical songs using old musical forms (and sometimes famous old melodies). Tompkins Square's new three-disc collection of these American murder ballads and disaster songs is an extensive, though by no means exhaustive, sampling of what Tom Waits calls in the liner notes the "oral tabloids of the day."

Disc 1, "Man V Machine," includes many songs about railroad disasters, from famous stories like the Old 97 and Casey Jones to obscurities like Ernest Stoneman's tale of a fellow named Talmadge Osborne who died trying to get on a moving freighter, and Alfred Reed's "Fate of Chris Lively and Wife," whose wagon got hit by a train. There are auto, airship, and airplane crashes, and a weird reworking of the John Henry legend called "Bill Wilson" by the Birmingham Jug Band. The Titanic is well represented, most curiously in a recording of a traditional Hebrew prayer recorded in 1913 by Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, and a stream-of-consciousness spoken word ramble by Frank Hutchison written 15 years after the great ship went down.

Disc 2, "Man V Nature," deals with "natural" events like fires, floods, drought, pestilence, and disease. (Times haven't changed all that much since Old Testament days, have they?) The great Mississippi flood of 1927 weighs heavily in this group; rock fans will recognize the basis for Led Zeppelin's classic "When the Levee Breaks," recorded here in 1929 by Kansas Joe and the great guitarist Memphis Minnie. But there was a great variety of disasters to sing about. Charlie Patton's compelling first recording, "Boll Weevil Blues," is here, contrasting interestingly with Fiddlin' John Carson's take on the same subject. Charlotte and Bob Miller's rendition of "Ohio Prison Fire," written just three days after the dreadful 1930 blaze that killed more than 300 prisoners, includes an extended spoken dialogue between a grieving mother and the warden, while Blind Alfred Reed's "Explosion in the Fairmount Mine" uses an unusual minor chord to dramatize a child's premonition of that 1907 disaster.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics and lead editor of the Culture section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases and writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent albums. …

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