Deckhands and Shipwrecks, Poetry and Tragedy
Sunset over Lake Michigan, from Christmas Cove, Leelanau Peninsula
photo by K. Bigger
Disaster and Tragedy
Among the small number of conversations among friends that initially inspired this blog back in 2011/2012 was a discussion about a shipwreck. It was about the RMS Titanic specifically, and why the disaster of its sinking led to so much music and art, both at the time and subsequently, when disasters like the Halifax Explosion did not. The answers will be mostly obvious to those with a knowledge of the class dimensions of the Titanic story, not to mention the colossal hubris that its voyage symbolized. The core question that animated that discussion also animates our discussion of murder ballads: what turns death and disaster into tragedy? How do we wring some meaning out of hard, brutal, deadly events?
Cindy Hunter Morgan (photo courtesy of Morgan)
Shipwreck songs have this affinity with murder ballads. We’ve covered several songs where tragedy transpires at sea: from “House Carpenter” and “The Essex” a few years back, to “Three Fishers” and “Sir Patrick Spens” within the past two months.
I recently began corresponding with Michigan-based poet Cindy Hunter Morgan. In addition to pursuing some deeper questions about murder ballads specifically, Morgan mentioned to me that another Michigan-based artist, composer Philip Rice, was currently adapting some of her poetry, a cycle of poems about shipwrecks, into music. This piqued my interest, especially as an opportunity to take a look at the process of rendering historic and tragic events musically, finding artistic meaning amidst the destruction and loss. It seemed an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of that process. Although the particular musical milieu for these works is a bit to the edge of our normal, folkier fare, I wanted to take a look, and bring you along with me.
Gichigumi, Mishigami …
Michigan has more miles of shoreline than any other state in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, with its two main peninsular landmasses touching four of the five Great Lakes. That it might serve as fertile territory for shipwreck songs is no surprise. The most famous Great Lakes shipwreck song is undoubtedly Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Although she sank in Canadian waters, the Whitefish Bay for which the ship was heading is off of the north coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
September derecho over Lake Michigan, photo by K. Bigger
The late Canadian singer-songwriter, Stan Rogers, also sang of the sailors of the Great Lakes, in songs such as “White Squall,” which came up in a post in 2012. Rogers’s song is not about a shipwreck, but about the deadly potential of summer squalls on the Lakes to whisk sailors overboard into the cold, deep waters.